Summary
Vers is an elite alien warrior in training for the Kree who are at war with the Skrulls, a shapeshifting alien species. When she is tasked with destroying a Skrull cell on Earth, she discovers that she is both more and less that who she thought she was.
My Viewing
I don’t know squat about Captain Marvel. Never read any of her comics. I thought the trailer looked a little like she was just a superhuman with hands that could do plasma blasts and with an additional couple of elements that still seems like who she is. She is a little overpowered for my taste and I was nervous about the CG in the film not looking as good in the trailer as I was hoping.
I tell you all this at the outset of my review so you know my headspace as I paid $10 dollars to see a movie I didn’t really expect to like very much.
My Thoughts
I have to say I enjoyed this movie more than I thought I would. The CG was better than I thought it would be and in the scene where Carol Danvers (Brie Larson, “The Glass Castle”) gets her powers the visuals are stunningly beautiful.
Unfortunately, that is the extent of what I think is special about this film. I suppose I could mention that it is a strong female led movie in series that has been pretty paint by the 18-25 White Male Demo numbers but I only count that as a true positive when the product is a good film like “Black Panther” rather than a lukewarm version of what amounts to a pretty standard superhero origin story which is just told out of order through flashbacks instead of straight through.
This is a movie I want to like but just refuses to let me. The stakes seem very low for Captain Marvel whose planet is only really in danger because she doesn’t want to give away a powerful artifact to her mentor of six years because an alien, who she has been conditioned to think of as duplicitous says he has a family. She seems very easily convinced to me.
On top of it all, she is constantly being scolded for being too brash and not logical enough, blindly following orders. Yet the only action which she takes that I feel like could be characterized in that way is the one I stated above. She isn’t brash, she’s just a bit rude. I feel like the film wanted to set up this dichotomy of an amazing soldier who just kept getting in trouble because she was a hot shot who followed her heart but rather than giving us examples of real situations where this attitude cost her setting up a growth in that area the director just tells us she is that way and the examples we see of her acting brash is her talking back to people and being sassy/snotty.
There was room for so much more character development in this film. Marvel sometimes seems to forget that character development and character explanation are different things. It’s not interesting to hear a character is one thing or another. It is fun to see that a character is that way and discover it through the act of watching.
Hopefully this will be drawn a little more powerfully for me in “Endgame” when I see it but for me this movie is just a decent super-hero film. No more, no less, and certainly no marvel.
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