Is this part of the MCU recap? Does a new movie count?

Meh.

SPOILER FREE

Captain Marvel was pretty okay. It had some really sincere moments, but it’s weighted down by a lot of just generic-ness. Most of the characters are bland, including Captain Marvel herself, which made for a lot of boring scenes. Brie Larson would smile and laugh, but her jokes didn’t land and rarely elicited a response from myself or the theater I was in. There was one scene in particular where another character describes her as “funny”, and I chuckled because I thought that was a joke. Turns out, that was meant to be sincere. I found her unremarkable, like Ed Norton’s take on Bruce Banner. The movie around her was much more interesting.

Or at least, it would have been if they didn’t give us flashbacks in the opening scene. Literally the opening scene shows big chunks of her origin story as a human on Earth, but the movie spends the next hour pretending it’s a mystery. Revealing the “mystery” when the audience already knows what happens is not interesting, Marvel. Take notes.

Captain Marvel is, after Age of Ultron, probably the most generic, by-the-books Marvel movie yet. Watching it felt like, “Yep. It’s another Marvel movie.” and after going through the entire catalog of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I’m really sick of that feeling. There’s a whole scene dedicated to making jokes about the name Marvel. Enough quipping, guys.

But it isn’t without merit. Sam Jackson is a genius. Lashana Lynch was pretty good, but the girl playing her daughter, Akira Akbar, stole the show. Ben Mendelsohn, for the first time in years, plays an interesting character rather than Generic McBadGuy.

Hoo boy, but that CGI was bad. Bad bad bad. Brie Larson fighting in space looked like a doll on a fly-wire. It was bad. All the action scenes looked like plastic, and so did the cat for all the cat CGI scenes.

Do I recommend Captain Marvel? Does it matter? It’s an MCU movie, which means you have the option to watch it, or you have the option to not understand what happens in the next movie you do care about. Every Marvel movie except Thor: The Dark World is mandatory for understanding Avengers: Infinity War and soon, Avengers: Endgame. It’s fun- a pleasant way to kill two hours of your time, but it doesn’t rise any higher than that.

SPOILER-Y

The big twist in Captain Marvel is that she’s working for the Kree, who we know to be the bad guys from Guardians of the Galaxy, and that surprise! They’re still the bad guys. I really did think they were going to be framed as the good guys here, and I’m glad Marvel went a different route. The Skrulls, sworn enemy of the Kree, are actually a bunch of disparate groups of refugees in search of a new home, and for the first time, Marvel really shows off some civilian characters. In both Avengers movies, they pay lip service to the idea of civilian protection, but in Captain Marvel we actually see families ripped apart by war. I loved the Skrull family scenes.

As the films progress, the sci-fi is becoming clearer. Everything “weird” in the universe can be traced back to one thing: The Infinity Stones. The evil weapons from Captain America, Scarlet Witch’s power, Vision, and now Captain Marvel’s power all come from Stones, and I love that. It creates a mortar that binds the series together.

Mar-Vell, who deserves an award for the laziest name in history (I know it’s from the comics, and I still don’t care), has stolen the Tesseract from S.H.I.E.L.D. and is hiding it in space to work on a secret project: building an FTL engine to help the Skrulls escape the tyranny of the Kree Empire.

I want that cat. I want that cat. That is a good cat. Best cat. They spent half the runtime trying to convince us that it was a Skrull shapeshifting into a kitty, and it was not. That was some lovely misdirection.

I’m torn on whether I love or hate Nick Fury losing his eye because of a cat scratch. On the one hand, it’s hilarious. On the other… it’s kind of dumb.

What was really dumb, though, was this long, extended fight scene where Captain Marvel fights her old Kree allies. It takes forever, and it’s stupid because she could end the fight in a heartbeat and actually go help her friends. She winds up fighting Jude Law for several minutes before he just escapes anyway. What a waste of time.

Speaking of Jude Law, he made for an okay villain I guess. He wasn’t particularly remarkable as Jude Law- just about any actor could have played that part. But boy oh boy did Jilly and I get sick of hearing him say “control your emotions” over and over again. Jilly’s going to see it again tonight, and she told me she’ll count the number of times Carol was told to control her emotions. Obviously, the point of the movie is that she doesn’t have to do that, but they really hammered in a point that didn’t need to be hammered in.

On that same note, Captain Marvel completely lacks any subtext. Every emotion, every thought, every everything is slapped right in the middle of the screen. There were a few moments where Brie Larson could have looked in the camera, given a wink and a thumbs up, and said “FEMINISM!” and it wouldn’t have even felt out of place.

Oh, wait, there was a whole sequence where the character of Carol Danvers as a child, teen, then adult, stared at the camera and looked “empowered”. So that actually happened.

Leaving the theater, Cait and Lexi said it best: Captain Marvel is a man’s idea of what a feminist movie should look like, and it really misses the mark from the social justice angle. I have to agree- this didn’t feel like a feminist movie in the slightest.

It’s a real shame that this super-hyped up movie was so stunningly mediocre. I hope the Russo brothers do a better job of representing Carol Danvers in Avengers: Endgame- they made Star Lord and Doctor Strange much more compelling than in their respective films, so I have hope.