Captain Marvel is a film about a space alien who isn’t really a space alien who crash lands on Earth to learn her own identity.
It took over ten years, but there’s finally a female led superhero film within the Marvel cinematic universe. Captain Marvel follows Carol Danvers a.k.a Vers a.k.a. Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) who is a member of an elite Kree military outfit along with her mentor Yon-Rogg (Jude Law). The Kree are at war with a race of aliens, knwon as the Skrulls, who can shapeshift into other beings with ease. Danvers has unique powers that essentially make her the most OP member of the Marvel roster, like Superman but without the kryptonite. The conflict is that Danvers has no memory of where she came from, but keeps having flashbacks to an old life on Earth. So she ends up on Earth where she joins forces with a digitally de-aged Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury, and they set off on an adventure to find out about her old mysterious life.
Captain Marvel is a fun film. It checks all the boxes of your standard MCU fare. It has action, it has humour, it has quips, it has a relatively weak and unmemorable villain and it ties into a greater film universe. The thing with Captain Marvel is that it’s set in the mid 90s, and the movie has a lot of fun with that. It can’t find nearly enough flannel and 90s alt rock to cram into its 124 minute run time.
The film was directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who have mainly done more independent films and television gigs. But that seems to be the key to directing a major Hollywood franchise blockbuster these days – release one or two critically acclaimed indie films, then Disney/Sony/Universal etc come a-knockin’. And they do a find job here in directing (and writing) the film. Geneva Robertson-Dworet also gets a screenwriting credit, who also worked on last year’s Tomb Raider film.
There are problems with the film though, largely with the titular character. You see, Captain Marvel has herself an arc. She’s been held back and told what to do by people (mainly men) her entire life. And in the end, she stands up for herself. “I don’t have to prove myself to you” she says to the big baddie of the film at the end. She’s learned and she’s grown. The issue is that for at least two thirds of the movie, she really has no recollection of any of this and is, for all intents and purposes, a completely different person. It’s just this bizarre disconnect as there’s Earthling Carol Danvers and there’s the Kree Vers. They’re both spunky, smart-mouthed soldier types, but both with different memories essentially. She is an entertaining enough character, somewhat more fun and less stoic than your Captain Americas and Black Panthers, but not quite as silly as your Star-Lords and Ant-Mans. She kind of fits in that middle ground. My biggest gripe though, is perhaps the same as I have with Superman. I never felt like she was in any real danger as she’s consistently the most powerful person in the room (which is probably why they had to come up with excuses to keep her out of the story in Endgame). It’s hard to feel tension when your protagonist can just destroy a fleet of enemy ships without breaking a sweat. It’s something that you can give a pass for this movie perhaps, but it’ll be interesting to see how they handle Captain Marvels future adventures.
Really, the strength of the film is the chemistry between Brie Larson and Samuel L Jackson. They work great together and their characters bounce off of each other believably. This film works as something of a backdoor origin story for Nick Fury as well as an origin for Captain Marvel. It is neat to see a somewhat younger and more lighthearted Fury as opposed to the older, more no-nonsense Fury we get in the more recent films. I don’t know if that was a conscious effort by the screenwriters to soften his character up here, or if that’s just how they wrote him.
The action sequences are all fine, although there were a few scenes later in the movie where I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. But the visual effects are all neat and the de-aging on Jackson is eerily good. The soundtrack is naturally a lot of grunge/alternative rock/pop songs from the 90s, so it gets a little bit of that Guardians of the Galaxy nostalgia going for it, albeit not executed as smoothly.
It won’t go down as the most memorable entry into the decade old franchise, but at the very least, it’s still a fun and entertaining sci-fi/action flick.
Rating: ★★★
Zero Stars 