My Dad adored this movie when it wrapped up, but he's been on a 1990's nostalgic bandwagon for a while now, so that's not surprising. I found the film a nice but messy story that borrows a bit too much from other movies in the MCU, but is compelling enough to welcome a new supercharged character into the story. But was a large amount of the hate of this movie fueled by sexist trolls online who apparently cannot handle a woman being the lead in a Marvel Movie (but were strangely quiet about Wonder Woman)? Yes. Do I think this movie is above criticism because of this? No. If you think a movie is beyond critiquing because of some trolls, you aren't mature enough to make film criticism a path for you. No, Captain Marvel isn't at the source for the "pussification" of America, nor is it a glowing piece of feminist art that needs to be studied for years to come. It just...exists. And sometimes that's a good thing.
Plot: On the Kree Capital Planet, agent of their "peacekeeper" force named Vers (Brie Larson) suffers from bouts of amnesia and nightmares. While she is trained by both a central computer and her own commanding officer Yon-Rogg (Jude Law), she cannot escape these feelings of doubt and curiosity to her life before serving the Kree. During a clash with their longtime nemesis the Skrulls, a race of alien shapeshifters, Vers mind is probed and they discover that she has memories of the Planet Earth, but Vers escapes and crash lands in Los Angeles. This draws the attention of S.H.I.E.L.D. (oddly enough with it's acronym in tact even though we know they only figure it out in 2008, but I digress), and they dispatch agents Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg). After acquiring the crystals that contained the memories the Skrulls took from her, Vers and Fury head to an Air Force base to figure out parts of her past. While there, Vers learns that she wasn't a Kree at all, but a human who was said to have died in an experimental flight accident on behalf of the Air Force.
Vers and Fury escape the Skrulls as they slowly infiltrate S.H.I.E.L.D. and seek out the answers to Vers' past, which leads her to an old friend in Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch), who reveals to Vers that her real name was Carol Denvers and that the two were best friends and something of a family to one another. While trying to sort out the remaining memories of her past and how she ended up with the Kree, the Skrulls arrive and inform Carol and Fury that they are simply refugees fleeing from the Kree, who have been hunting them down for years. They also add another layer to the story that a woman who also disappeared alongside Carol years ago (Annette Bening) was actually a Kree scientist helping them that was struck down by Yon-Rogg when they tried to keep the power of their hyperspace engine (AKA the Tesseract)? from the Kree and Danvers managed to do so, not only gaining some of the power of the hyperspace engine inside of her but also causing her to lose her memory. With the Kree in hot pursuit of Vers, the Skrulls and the Tesseract, Carol must decide whether or not to support those she had memories of fighting alongside or the home she can barely remember.
What's Wrong?: The film is a bit of a mess in terms of consistency with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, isn't it. The Tesseract somehow ended up in space, even though it was fished out of the frozen arctic waters by Howard Stark at the end of Captain America: The First Avenger and was taken from a Norse Temple by Red Skull at the beginning of said movie during World War II. But apparently it was used as a hyperspace engine before S.H.I.E.L.D. planned to use it as weapons in the first Avengers movie to counteract the arrival to Earth of Thor and the Asgardians? Why would they let something known to be THIS powerful out of their hands for something like this? And speaking of the supposedly acronym-less organization, Coulson informs Pepper Potts after Tony's rescue in Iron Man that they haven't come up with the acronym of S.H.I.E.L.D. by the time of that movie's release (2008) and they suddenly have it back in the 1990s? And had it during the period between World War II and Hydra's infiltration of it in Winter Soldier? I guess the MCU has gotten rusty on it's own history by 2019.
And I'm honestly starting to get a little tired of these overly powerful superheroes in movies coming out. Infinity War did a good job of humbling the Avengers with Thanos utterly wrecking all of them at some point in the movie, including Thor both physically and mentally, when he was considered the most powerful Avenger by far (save for by Tony Stark). But this movie begins to have the same problem that characters like Superman have, in that when you give a character too much power, you begin to wonder why they even need to have a team of other superheroes running around. The only match for someone like Captain Marvel in this movie is someone who shares her powers, as General Zod matched Superman in both Superman II and Man of Steel. Once you see what she can do, there kinda isn't a point to the other characters existing as she could literally take out Thanos on her own without any of the Infinity Stones on her side. If you make a character this strong without having a weakness (such as Thor's emotional vulnerability following the events of The Dark World, Age of Ultron and Ragnarok) then you have a character who's main flaw is they have no flaws. And why watch a movie when a character can literally do anything the movie requires her to? This is a problem both this movie and Justice League had, in that they needed to bring the main superhero into the situation, but also needed to have an excuse as to why they didn't take on the main villain for most of the fighting. Superman ragdolls Steppenwolf throughout the climax of Justice League and then randomly departs to save some citizens in the Russian village, while Marvel is taking out Thanos's ships left and right in the next film, but leaving Thanos himself for the main Avengers to fight because...reasons?
And it wouldn't be much of a Captain Marvel review if I didn't touch on the comments of one Brie Larson herself. Wow, did she make a ton of enemies from pre-production on. Not only in terms of the production teams and actors, but also society on the whole. She went into a rant at an awards ceremony about how she doesn't want "40 year old white men" commenting and critiquing her movie, claiming it wasn't made for them, but for little girls and women. Well, unfortunately for Miss Larson, the comic book movie community still has a very large nerd and geek community of men between the ages of 30 and 50 that constantly go to see these movies and have review sites and jobs as critics to do their jobs and review movies. I get that a part of this was meant to say that she would like to see more attention given to women critics in the world of Hollywood, but the way she said it makes her look as if she's trying to actively hate men (in particular white men) while ironically being a perfect caricature of an American woman (white, blonde hair, gorgeous, etc.) She also took part in a handful of press pieces and interviews where she comes off as a snarky and condescending person.
I say this not to demean Larson, but to point out that she took this kind of attitude towards the whole thing before her movie had even debuted. This would be the equivalent of Robert Downey Jr. going on a drug kicker years after being sober just before Iron Man premiered back in 2008. No one knew how she would be in the movie and we were left to puzzle and guess how her performance would be. And it was decidedly...meh. She's certainly not terrible, but the movie doesn't give her the chance to be a consistent character. Sometimes she's moody, sometimes she's snarky, other times she's sincere. And she does not have the acting chops RDJ has to to be able to do all three of those things at once. I know she can be a good actor, but I don't think this role agrees with her unfortunately. And this stays the same for Endgame as well. The movie doesn't know what it wants her to be and it comes off with Larson not knowing which acting abilities of hers to use or convey. Movies like these are tough to sit through because they do not have a vehicle for the lead to ride in on and they exist, as Ant-Man and the Wasp did before it, just to prepare you for another movie.
What's Good?: With Larson's "meh" performance aside, it was nice to get some good solid acting from other parts of this story. I know Jude Law was a "villain of the week" kind of bad guy, but I think he did a good job of being memorable as Yon-Rogg. He's an unrepentant murderer and there's nothing wrong with that. The movie clearly tells itself without the need for a truly conventional villain as the Kree themselves are made to be mostly evil, but he's pretty good in that villain role. And it's also finally nice to see Samuel L. Jackson do some acting in this movie that isn't just him being a shady operative of S.H.I.E.L.D. and more just a solid and outspoken performance of his. He gets emotionally involved in this movie and I can get behind that. He really did seem to be phoning it in by the time we got to Winter Soldier, so it's nice to see him breathe fresh life into a character I long thought to be one of the more forgettable characters in he MCU were it not for him being Samuel L. Jackson. The side characters and situations on Earth I found pretty amusing and I loved the fact that they subverted the storyline idea that Fury's eye was taken out during some kind of dangerous mission and was just an alien cat.
As a kid born in the 90's, I will give credit where it's due that they did convey a strong sense of the 1990s in this film, but the product plugs can get a little grating. I mean, did we really need an action scene right by a friggin Blockbuster Video Store? But it's nice to see that they took the time to explore the 90s and not give the characters apart from the aliens too much technology that it becomes distracting, especially considering how little anyone knew about the universe before Tony Stark took up becoming Iron Man in 2008.
Overall: I will never understand the hatred or love for this movie. It's just a passable movie, in that it's fairly decent and I'd give it a passing grade, but it's one you could probably get away with reading the Wikipedia article about it before going into Endgame. Were Larson's comments that bad that you have to castigate the entire movie just to protect your fragile masculinity? And was her performance so awe inspiring that charity drives needed to be made so underprivileged little girls could go and see it, benefitting no one but Disney themselves? Of course not. This film exists to be one last tide over film before Avengers: Endgame. It doesn't try to be anything else, despite what arm chair critics and feminists would lead you to believe. It's a tolerable film that just doesn't know how to focus itself.
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