Review: Captain Marvel

Ahead of Avengers: Endgame, it’s time to introduce the population to the most powerful superhero in the MCU, Captain Marvel. This movie has to show the people why Nick Fury paged her right before he turned into fairy dust. It had to do an origin story. It had to get the audience from “who?” to “OMG, I can’t wait to see her kick Thanos’ ass” in two hours.

And it’s fucking boring.

Let’s get the basics out of the way first. Blah Blah Spoilers. The main problem with this movie is that there is nothing original about it. If you’ve seen a superhero movie, or even an action movie, you’ve seen parts of this movie. I’ll get into that in a bit, but first let’s talk about the other thing that annoyed me about this movie. This is a bad feminist movie.

Now, a lot of people might take this moment to think I’m just another insecure incel complaining. I’m not. I don’t mean that it’s a bad movie BECAUSE it’s a feminist movie. I mean it’s bad AT BEING a feminist movie. I have no problem whatsoever with more inclusion in nerdom. The more people who like nerdy things, the more those nerdy things make money, the more nerdy things get made. I’m comfortable enough with my manliness, that it doesn’t bother me in the slightest that women get another hero. I still get to identify with Iron Man, Captain America, Spider-Man, Ant-Man, Thor, and literally 90% of the other heroes. So if women get 1% more, that doesn’t affect me. At all.

I knew going into this movie that it was going to be a feminist movie. I didn’t know, however, how badly they would do it. Towards the beginning, there’s a training scene, and the MAN says that Vers (Captain Marvel, played by Brie Larson) needs to control her emotions, and until she can beat him without her glowy hands of doom, he’ll still be better than her. Typical over the top, yet sadly realistic, male character. Towards the end of the movie, she has a chance. They’re fighting, and he says the same thing. What does she do? Does she finally best him without her powers, showing that she has mastered her skills? Does she make some sort of speech about her emotions being a source of strength? No. She blasts him with her aurora borealis hands and says “I don’t need to prove anything to you”.

The audience cheered. Look, I understand that constantly being forced to live by a man’s standards in a man’s world has been frustrating to women, and rightfully so. She shouldn’t have to prove herself to him. But she does need to prove it to the audience. I left that scene thinking, “well I guess she couldn’t beat him without her powers”. Doesn’t that send a bad message to young girls? “You can’t be better or even equal to a man without help.” That doesn’t really fit the feminist message, does it? Besides, from a purely storytelling point of view, this would have been the scene where she proved it to HERSELF. But nope. Snarky comment to fellate the SJWs.

If you ask people who’ve seen it, which characters they liked the most, most would say the cat and Ben Mendelsohn’s talos or Samuel L Jackson’s Fury. How much of a feminist movie is it when a woman isn’t even the best part of the movie? The only feminist message that came across was about her falling down and getting back up and trying again.

Everything else about the movie was stuff you’ve seen before. Fight on top of a train. Check. Character has amnesia that will show important secrets once retrieved. Check. Fight choreographed to a song that’s a little too on the nose. Check. Space battles. Check. Dogtag being the secret to why a character has a nickname. Check. Twist about a character not being who you thought they were. Check. Check.

Oh. Let’s not forget the easter eggs. Easter eggs and nods to the nerds used to be exciting. It was just for eagle eyed viewers who knew the source material. It was a way to reward people for their time. In this movie, it’s almost a plot. Do you want to know how Fury lost his eye? Do you want to know why the Avengers are called the Avengers? Do you want to know where the Tesseract was in the 90s? Do you wonder what Ronan the Accuser was doing before he was fighting the Nova Corps in Guardians of the Galaxy? They’re not even hidden anymore. They are spelled out to you. The 90s references were likewise over the top and shoved in your throat. Good for a few chuckles, but not nearly as clever as the writers wanted.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a terrible movie, by any means. It’s great mindless entertainment. Brie Larson was wonderful in the role, and everyone else in the movie did a fine job. My issue is with the writing. I loved how Carol Danvers (Captain Marvel’s human name) and Fury got along. They had some amazing chemistry, and that really flowed through the movie. Talos was a really interesting character, especially towards the end, and had a somewhat comedic talent. The cat was also funny, and arguably the funniest character in the movie.

Captain Marvel’s friend was underused. She was a badass in her own right. Single mother. Test pilot. Jumped into the thick of it with no goal other than to help. Part of me thought her daughter would become the new Iron Woman, but the timeline doesn’t add up. Still, it would have been a nice plot point.

To be fair, while this movie used a ton of things we’ve seen in other movies, they did leave out a few things. There’s no beam of destruction in the sky. There’s no hoard of CGI monsters to fight. So that’s good. The final battle shows Captain Marvel taking on Ronan’s ships. Not the people on it. The ships themselves. That was pretty awesome. Though (and this is the problem with prequels) we know that the Earth exists after the 90s. So was there really any worry that Ronan might do any damage? I mean, by the time the first Avengers movie happens, most people don’t know that aliens exist, so he clearly couldn’t do all that much. That makes this battle basically useless, other than to show some cool action. There are no stakes. Just fun pew pew stuff.

The music featured a lot of female singers from the 90s, and since I love 90s Alternative music, I loved that. It had a nice tribute to Stan Lee at the beginning, as well as one of his last cameos. The fight scenes were entertaining enough. Though, I’d be hard pressed to decide who would win in a brawl with a gang of people, between Captain Marvel and Black Widow. Black Widow took on 10 dudes with her legs in Civil War. Captain Marvel struggled against 5 dudes even though she has laser hands.

We don’t truly get to see how powerful Captain Marvel is until the last third of the movie, which is to be expected, I guess. I do look forward to seeing her pulverize Thanos, and can’t wait to see how well she interacts with the Avengers. It will be interesting seeing her talk with the Guardians about the Kree, and the planets she’s visited.

In the end, I don’t think I’ll buy this on DVD, but if it’s on Netflix, I’ll give it another chance. 3 stars. Not bad. Not good. Just an average movie.