Captain Marvel

CAPTAIN MARVEL

You know, this kind of worries me. This deluge of positivity is starting to unease me a little bit. I mean, all three of the films I have seen consecutively – The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, and now Captain Marvel -have been either good or really good. Now, this is can either be due to the luck of the draw or the fact that I am not working for a publication or website and can therefore choose what I review (no, I will not review A Madea Family Funeral – you can’t make me!). Either way, I’m worried. Not because I don’t like being positive about movies. It’s that I just can’t help but feel like an onset of awful movies is going to be coming soon.

Well, either way, yes, Captain Marvel is a good movie. Go see it? Wanna know why? Well, read on.

Usually, this is the portion of the review where I delve into the backstory about a certain property. But Captain Marvel’s history is a little too complex for me to summarize. So, if you want to know more, go watch Bob Chipman’s Big Picture episode on The Escapist (https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/2019/03/04/captain-marvel-how-did-we-get-here/). And besides, I barely know much about Captain Marvel other than the fact that she plays a huge role in defeating Thanos in the comics. So, this is the first Marvel movie since Guardians of the Galaxy where I barely knew anything about the character, which actually helps in my analysis of the film on its own and not how it stacks up against the source material.

On the planet of Hala, the capital of the Kree Empire, Vers (Brie Larsson) is a member of Starforce being trained by Yon-Rogg (Jude Law) and has no memory of where she came from. After a botched Starforce mission, Vers crash-lands on Earth in 1995. While trying to wait for Yon-Rogg and the rest of Starforce to rescue her, Vers finds out more about her past life on Earth and working with S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) to help ferret out the facts. But she is also being pursued by enemy Skrulls Talos (Ben Mendelssohn) and his crew. Along the way, she discovers more about the Skrulls and her past, only to come across a major discovery that changes her worldview.

This movie is way more awesome than I thought it would be. The film’s promotional materials did not really do much in exciting me for this movie, but after seeing it, I really enjoyed it. I’m discovering more and more that some of the best Marvel movies are the ones dealing with the outer-space lore of the comics, and Captain Marvel is no exception. In fact, this almost feels like what Green Lantern should have been. The outer space action scenes are thrilling, the designs for the aliens are cool, and the effects – as is typical for a Marvel movie – are really good.

But the real standout of this film is Brie Larsson as Captain Marvel. One of the unfortunate things this whole “controversy” has managed to do is make some people forget what a good actor she is. Whenever she gets to display her full power, she exudes a pure joy that is great to see. She also carries the dramatic moments very well, too, deftly executing the “Badass with Vague Memory” routine just as well as Hugh Jackman did as Wolverine. The rest of the actors all bring their A-game, too. Samuel L. Jackson can play Nick Fury in his sleep by now, but it’s fun to see him as a younger Nick Fury before he was hammered on the anvil of life, and the de-aging effects are probably gonna go down as the gold standard for how to carry out those effects. Ben Mendelssohn is fun as Talos, and Jude Law does well as Yon-Rogg. The film’s themes, without giving too much away, also expertly carry on the Marvel tradition of politically charged messages in a big sci-fi blockbuster movie.

If I did have one small problem with the movie, it’s that there’s a character whose identity I won’t spoil played by Maria Rambeau who is mostly present in flashbacks for the first two acts, but then enters the movie right around the start of Act III, and I wish she just featured into the plot more. They do find more use for her later in the film and it’s awesome, but I could have used a little more. Also, the climax left a little to be desired for me.

But other than that, there really isn’t much wrong with this film. It’s a fun space movie that explains the origins of one of Marvel’s weirder characters and also manages to stand out as one of the better origin movies of the MCU. Go and see it. Oh, and stay through the credits, but you already knew that.