Captain Marvel

In the grand scheme of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Captain Marvel is not one of the great entries, but it is a lot of fun.  It's the kind of movie that does its job, and does it very well, but it never goes above and beyond.  I doubt it will have the same impact that Black Panther had last year, but it doesn't have to.  All it has to do is successfully introduce a new hero into the Universe, make us want to see more, and make us more excited for the next Avengers movie on April 26th.  And that's just what it does.

There is quite a lot of backstory here, however, and the movie does take a little while to truly get moving.  One thing that the directing team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck do to hold our interest is throw us immediately into the action.  The film's heroine, Carol Danvers (portrayed by Brie Larson), is already a superpowered warrior deeply entangled in an intergalactic battle right as it opens.  She is fighting on the side of the Kree, an alien race that is in constant battle with the Skrulls, shape-shifting aliens who can assume any human or alien form, but usually appear as green-skinned creatures that kind of look like the long lost love child of Mr. Spock and the Jolly Green Giant.   Carol has a Kree mentor named Yon-Rogg (Jude Law), who has trained her how to use her powers in battle, and now wants her to join his fighting force as they battle a small band of Skrulls led by Talos (Ben Mendelsohn).  The first half hour or so of the film is not so much a superhero origin movie, as it is a space opera, with the actors throwing a lot of made up technical jargon and blasting each other.  It's impressive visually, but we don't learn much about Carol during this segment, other than she's skilled at kicking green alien butt.

To be perfectly fair, Carol doesn't know much about herself at this point of the story.  She was found by the Kree with no memories of her past, other than some small flashes of a life she knows nothing about, and makes no sense to her.  When Carol is forced to land on Earth in order to pursue some Skrulls, she finally begins to learn about herself before her time with her alien comrades in arms, and it's here that the movie starts to find its focus.  Her arrival on Earth is brought to the attention of S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), who has both eyes in this movie, due to the fact that the film is set in 1995.  Jackson has also been digitally altered to look younger via special effects.  I thought this would be distracting, but I was quickly able to stop looking at his digital face, and just focus on his performance.  The movie does have quite a lot of fun giving us a Nick Fury who is not yet the battle-hardened badass that we know from other Marvel movies.  He's a bit more optimistic here, and is just now learning about how big the universe beyond his own world can be with the arrival of these two warring alien forces, and him being stuck in the middle of it.

The friendship that builds between Carol and Nick makes up a big part of the human element of the story, but another important relationship concerns Carol and an old friend from her lost days, Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch, giving a standout performance), a former fighter pilot turned mother who helps Carol unlock her memories.  There are other important relationships that she develops that I cannot talk about for the sake of spoilers.  What I can talk about, however, is Goose the cat, who begins following Carol around shortly after she arrives on Earth, and whom Nick becomes especially attached to.  Goose is one of the great movie cats, stealing most of the scenes it's in, and it would be a crime to restrict her appearance to only one movie.

It is through these relationships that Carol finds her humanity and personality, and it is how Captain Marvel itself finds solid ground.  The whole alien conflict stuff never really connected with me, but once the movie slowed down enough to actually explore these characters, I became more involved.  A lot of this has to do with how Larson successfully portrays a lost soul who is looking for some kind of connection.  For all of the incredible powers the Kree have taught her, Carol is essentially a blank slate for a good part of the movie.  This is intentional, and fitting with the character from the comics, but it did give me worry early on that she was just going to be treated as a walking special effect.  Given Larson's past performances in films like Room, I knew she deserved more.  Fortunately, the movie does eventually let her develop, and I can see how she could grow into a much more interesting character in future appearances in Marvel films.

What was slightly less effective for me is how the movie throws a lot of mid-90s pop culture references and music on the soundtrack.  There are instances on the soundtrack that are just a bit too on-the-nose with the scene they were accompanying, or just came across as being kind of campy, like how they work "Just a Girl" by No Doubt into a key scene.  If you want a recent example of a Sci-Fi movie that used a decade's nostalgia effectively, look at Bumblebee from a few months ago.  That movie actually probably had an even stronger influence of pop culture (in this case the 80s), but it worked, because it was actually tied into the Transformers franchise itself, and the filmmakers knew how to use the nostalgia in such a way that it was warm and appropriate.  This movie seems to just be throwing nostalgia up on the screen, and saying "remember that?".  It's not integral, and it exists just for some extra gags.

Captain Marvel is the kind of movie that does work, but I think will be more effective as the future films build her character, and her overall place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe itself.  The movie is a gamble, and has already created some controversy within the fan community before it even opened, but I think it will pay off in the end.  Much like DC's Wonder Woman movie from a couple years ago, it brings some much needed diversity to the superhero genre, but more than that, it's an effective introduction that made me want to see more.

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