Captain Marvel (2019)

Directed by Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck (Sugar, Mississippi Grind)

Written by Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, & Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Tomb Raider 2018)

(This review is spoiler-free)

The long-awaited first female-lead Marvel superhero movie, Captain Marvel had a huge amount of hype and expectation to live up to. Made as a prequel so as not to interrupt the continuity of Marvel’s two-year Avengers finale, the movie is steeped in ’90s nostalgia and gives us an origin story not just for its eponymous character, but also for Nick Fury and elements of the SHIELD organization. Although it has a ton of potential and some really interesting actors portraying cool and exciting characters, the movie definitely has some notable weaknesses that slow it down. None of them are fatal, but they add up to a sort of weak, nagging noise that constantly hampers the sense of fun that the rest of the movie keeps trying to create. The story starts with Captain Marvel (Brie Larson, but never actually called Captain Marvel in the movie proper) as Vers, an agent of the Kree empire’s elite Starforce squadron. She has nightmares and amnesia, which is movie code for slightly non-traditional origin story. While in pursuit of the shapeshifting Skrull aliens that the Kree have been fighting for generations, Vers is captured and put in a memory probe machine that activates some of her repressed memories and leads her (along with a group of Skrulls) to Earth. There she meets Nick Fury (a phenomenally de-aged Samuel L. Jackson), whom she enlists to help her stop the Skrull invasion of Earth. Things aren’t quite what they seem on basically any front, and Vers must face her past and decide what to do with her future.

There’s a lot that this movie gets right. Its basic premise is really fun, and while amnesia is a really trope-y decision for the main character, it does allow for a slightly less boring than usual origin story. In many ways the movie unfolds like a mystery, with Vers slowly uncovering evidence of her past piece by piece along with the audience. As a mystery, it’s middling. Most of the revelations and ‘twists’ are pretty standard, and I don’t think anyone will be shocked by anything that emerges from Vers’s past. It gives the story a lot more structure than most Marvel origin stories, though, and that is incredibly welcome. Some of the other liberties that the writers took with the source material are really interesting ones, and there are a couple that might legitimately surprise long-term comics fans. The disadvantage to that is that I don’t think they’ll land as hard for the uninitiated, playing out more like standard plot twists than huge revelations. This is a weird thing for a movie to do, and is quite contrary to the general trend among Marvel movies. Usually there are some small references thrown in for deep lore fans that have relatively little to do with the overall plot. Here they’re rewriting vast swathes of Marvel lore, but I’m not sure anyone will actually notice unless they’re big fans of cosmic Marvel stuff. This doesn’t really affect the overall quality of the film, but it’s certainly an interesting decision on the part of the creative team. I really have no problem with the basic structure of the movie. It’s functional instead of showy, but there are a decent number of these that don’t even pull off functional, so I appreciate it.

The characters are a very mixed bag, and the biggest issue the movie has is that its central character is probably its least interesting one. It reminds me in some ways of Black Panther, whose central figure is a pretty standard Marvel creation surrounded by vibrant, fascinating and varied individuals. Vers fits pretty perfectly into the now bog-standard Marvel hero mold: she is a snarky wise-guy type who doesn’t take anything seriously until the plot needs her to. Personally, this archetype is starting to grate. I wish they had come up with a personality for this character that wasn’t just a female clone of Tony Stark, Stephen Strange, Peter Quill, and Scott Lang (who all, for the record, are basically the exact same character with different levels of intelligence). She’s not a bad character, per se, just one I’ve seen before a bunch and I was hoping they would use their big “first female protagonist” moment to do something a little more outside their mold. The other characters supplement that nicely, though. Ben Mendelsohn does an amazing job as the leader of the Skrulls, and turns in a much more interesting performance than that relatively simple role would seem to imply. He and Samuel L. Jackson are both very obviously enjoying themselves playing largely against type. Nick Fury in this film is vastly different from any other appearance of the character, and not just because his eye is intact. Except when he is running, it is almost impossible to tell that he has been digitally reconstructed into his younger self. And Jackson absolutely embodies his younger, more enthusiastic and fun-loving self, with many of the best jokes in the movie centering around the audience’s presumed understanding of what a total badass he is (and how very…not that…he is here). Jude Law is a little more one-dimensional as Vers’s boss Yon-Rogg, but he does what Jude Law does best: smoldering and yelling. And Lashana Lynch and Akira Akbar are really believable as mother-daughter pair Maria and Monica Rambeau. Their family has a lived-in feel that is natural and heart-warming. If there is a really weak point, it’s the Starforce squadron. They feel very much of a piece with the Thanos henchmen in Infinity War, with shreds of personality but no time or effort at expanding or illuminating them. They’re each basically a skillset and that’s about it, which means the fights that they get into are tough to get too invested in.

Thematically, I like a lot of what they were trying to do, but not all of the execution. They’re largely working in the territory of the latent power of women and the need to make that unique power your own, which is a really interesting theme that would require a female-led movie to explore sufficiently. Unfortunately, most of Vers’s claiming of her power falls flat because the fight scene it takes place in is boring and lifeless (not helped at all by one of the most awkward and cringey needle drops in recent film memory). The ‘standing up’ montage is a legitimately great film moment (that was once again foolishly wasted on a trailer, but that’s not the movie’s fault), but I would have liked to spend just a little more time in Danvers’s past to make those moments hit a little harder. The one unadulterated victory for the film’s messaging, though, is in the denouement. Vers final confrontation with her antagonist is done wonderfully, and put a huge ‘I see what they did there’ grin on my face (it is not subtle, but which of these movies is?). I really like some of the themes they explored with their two alien races as well, and those dovetail nicely with the ideas of family the movie is exploring. It’s unfortunate that I had to include so many caveats in the above, because the elements are there for greatness, but the execution just seems off to a degree. Some moments aren’t allowed the impact they need, while others are too belabored. It always feels close to greatness, but never quite there.

While there are definitely elements to enjoy about the movie, many of them seem peripheral to what the movie is focusing on, and that leads to a strange disorientation, for me at least. I was almost constantly wanting the movie to do something other than what it currently was, or to do it in a different way, but it didn’t really ruin my enjoyment of the film. After watching, slightly more frustration set in as I thought about some of the missed opportunities and fumbled execution of some legitimately great ideas here. The movie is a pleasant enough experience, but I don’t think will become one of the more lasting entries in the Marvel Universe. There are just a few too many things a little bit too askew for me to give this a clear recommendation. If you’re a Marvel fan, it’s certainly worth a watch or two, and if you’re a comics fan I would argue you could knock it up one (or at least a half) star just for the cool stuff they do with the Kree and the Skrulls, but others won’t be missing too much if they give this one a pass. I’m still excited for the character’s execution in this evening’s Avengers: Endgame, and I wouldn’t say no to a current-day sequel (which we are inevitably getting) either.

Overall:

Stray Thoughts:

• Not too much to put down here, since this one’s pretty new.
• Gemma Chan is criminally wasted in this movie. They should be ashamed of themselves.
• I have (almost) nothing to say about Brie Larson as a person. Some of her public comments seem a little ignorant, but I’ve heard worse, like, today. She does an okay job in this movie. She strikes me as a J-Law type, who doesn’t have a lot of range but does pretty well at what she’s good at.
• Goose is best cat. There is no argument. All haters are dumb idiots who I hate.
• Post Credits scene 1: Nice little tease for Endgame. Nothing special, but it got me a little excited.
• Post Credits scene 2: I guessed this post credits scene nearly exactly before it happened, but that didn’t make me like it any less.
• Stan Lee cameo: One of the weirdest ones of these, it’s bizarrely meta-, and if you think about it too much your head will explode. Major points just for being incredibly different from the others. Also, there are no pictures of it online, so enjoy this picture from right before it happens: