“Finally, a female superhero on the big screen!” presumably said somebody in 1984 when Supergirl was released to theaters. Since then, the only female comic heroes that have made it into the movies are Batgirl, The Invisible Woman, Catwoman, Storm, Rogue, Mystique, Kitty Pryde, Jubilee, Psylocke, Elektra, Jean Grey, Black Widow, Scarlet Witch, Gamora, Nebula….oh and that Wonder Woman movie that made over $1 billion way back in freaking 2017. But, sure, Captain Marvel gets bonus points for finally bringing girl power to the comic book movie world.
Now that I’ve got that off my chest, this is fine. Nothing particularly memorable, nothing particularly bad. Kids will probably like it. I feel like I should keep those last three sentences on hand when reviewing superhero movies because I can barely tell them apart at this point. But this is fine.
The plot here is a bit much, so I’ll just give the broadest strokes. Brie Larson stars as Captain Marvel, who crash lands on Earth in the 1990s and is in the middle of a conflict between two alien races. She meets up with young SHIELD agent Nick Fury (played, as usual, by Samuel L. Jackson) and they work together to protect earth from the evil aliens while trying to figure out Marvel’s murky past. It’s a hell of a lot more complicated than that, but I’m not getting paid by the word here. Or paid at all. I just enjoy doing this.
Captain Marvel is a decent movie. It moves at a good pace, the special effects are solid (I particularly like the practical makeup on the Skrulls) and the performances are enjoyable. Larson is a talented actress that seems to be having a lot of fun with this and Jackson also seems to be having the time of his life while playing this part. The film has funny moments (my favorite part of the movie is the damn cat), and gets better if you are familiar with the Marvel Universe films. We get to see an early version of SHIELD and the future villain in Guardians of the Galaxy and the origin of several major things that will come later, such as the name Avengers and Nick Fury’s need for an eyepatch (which retroactively makes lines in the other movies freaking hilarious). There are also some Easter eggs for hardcore comic fans (be on the lookout for Photon). However, it does beg the question of why Nick Fury seems to be surprised by the existence of aliens in the latter Marvel movies. I guess the events of this film slipped his mind.
I’m also somewhat impressed by how the character continuity was handled here because Captain Marvel has possibly the most complicated history of any comic character in history, and that’s fucking saying something. The first Captain Marvel isn’t even a Marvel character (and will, oddly, be the subject of a review next month; hint: it isn’t Pet Sematary). Even in the Marvel Universe, Carol Danvers is the sixth or seventh character to use the Captain Marvel name and the character was just given that name in the last ten years. For most of her existence, she was known as Ms. Marvel and has also gone by Warbird and probably several other monikers. What I’m saying is that this could have easily been a disaster. The movie does take liberties and combines elements from several iterations of the Captain Marvel characters, but the writers did about as good a job as you could hope for making this a coherent character. My only complaint is that I still don’t understand Captain Marvel’s powers. In one scene, she will be borderline invincible. In the next scene, she will be getting her ass kicked. Consistency, movie. You need it to establish these things.
However, its also very much a blah affair. Maybe it’s just because I’ve seen so many of these things, but it’s pretty paint-by-numbers at this point. The Captain Marvel character isn’t particularly interesting and the villain is so forgettable that I just looked at Wikipedia to find out his name (it’s a spoiler, so I won’t say it). The main plot takes a back seat to the world building going on around it and the film is more interesting for the groundwork that it lays for the other films than it is for its own story. I was just never very invested in this.
Overall, Captain Marvel is a serviceable superhero movie. Nothing more, nothing less. It is basically a 2-hour prep to get from the last scene of Avengers: Infinity War to the beginning of Avengers: Endgame, but it serves that function well enough. Now I have to look forward to the remaining 45 superhero movies that we will get this year. Too bad the Black Widow movie is a couple of years away, because then we will finally be getting a female hero!
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