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| Say what you like about the movie, but she looks great in that costume. |
Captain
Marvel has some pretty big shoes to fill, being that she is one of Marvel’s
most powerful characters and being that she was the focus of the end credit
scene of Avengers: Infinity War. For
those who might not remember, as the vast populations of New York was disintegrating
following Thanos’ snap, Director Fury’s final action was to pull out an old but
fancy looking pager with Captain Marvel’s emblem on it. We had a lot of
questions following this scene, such as when did Fury meet the Captain, where
was she during all of the insanity of the last few years, why did he need a
pager to summon her? All of these questions and more will be answered in the
course of this film. Let’s get to it.
We open to Carol… I mean, Vers,
having a nightmare. She dreams of being in some kind of fire fight with a few
hazy individuals. She awakes and we see a day in her life. She’s a Kree
soldier, part of their elite Starforce. She trains with her commander,
Yon-Rogg, both in combat and in controlling her emotions, which is a big deal
with the Kree. After a meeting with the Supreme Intelligence, the AI master of
the Kree, she’s put on her first mission after waking up on Hala, the Kree
homeworld, six years ago.
Vers and her team are dispatched to
a Kree border world to retrieve a spy they’d had on the surface. He’d been
discovered by a group of Skrull and activated his distress beacon. The Skrull
are a race of shapeshifting aliens that the Kree have been at war with for
centuries. These aliens are particularly dangerous as they can assume the form
of other beings down to their DNA and can even scan and utilize their targets
most recent memories. The Starforce’s main job is hunting Skrull infiltrators
and wiping them out.
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| I'd have really liked even a throwaway line as to why some Kree are blue, and some are standard human colors. |
Planet side, the Kree are ambushed
by dozens of Skrull as they track down their spy. Vers is separated from her team
and is captured by the Skrull leader, Talos. Vers is put into a device that
scans her subconscious memories. Which is impressive considering she had
complete amnesia. They focus in on a woman from her past, interestingly this
woman is the person that the Supreme Intelligence assumes the form of when Vers
visits it, and a set of coordinates. Vers breaks free, beats the crap out of
the Skrull and escapes as their ship crashes. She makes a not so graceful
landing in the middle of a Blockbuster video. Yep, she was taken to Earth… specifically
LA… in the mid-90s! Oh no!!!!!!
Vers is able to get a message out
to Yon-Rogg and her team, who tell her to stay still and lie low. She also asks
Yon-Rogg if she’d ever been to Earth before, which Yonny fervently denies. Laying
low is made somewhat difficult with the arrival of Director… (sorry, forgot,
90s,) Agent Fury and rookie Agent Coulson. They attempt to interrogate the
Alien soldier but their interview is cut short by a Skrull sniper. Vers chases
after the shooter, but loses him. Vers was able to recover a crystal the Skrull
was carrying that has most of her recovered memories on it. Fury, who’d been following on the street, does
kill another Skrull that had assumed Coulson’s shape. He shows it to his boss,
Director Keller. They’re shocked to see this obvious alien. Keller tells Fury
to meet Vers and try to work with her. After Fury leaves, Keller puts his head
to the dead alien and says a little prayer over him. Yeah, Keller has been
replaced by Talos.
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| Your first mistake was letting her regain consciousness. |
Fury tracks Vers, who’d stolen some
grunge clothes and a motorcycle, to a bar that she’d seen in the crystal. They
interrogate each other, where we learn a little about Fury’s history (former
Colonel turned spy turned SHIELD desk jockey, can’t eat toast sliced
diagonally) and that Skrull can’t copy powers, or so Vers claims after she
photon blasts a Jukebox. Fury agrees to help Vers find the woman, someone that
Vers identifies as Lawson.
They use some info they’d scrounged
up, and Fury’s security clearance, they break into Pegasus, a secret military
base that Lawson worked in. They sneak into records and discover a few things.
That the woman is Dr. Wendy Lawson, she is very dead, and she was a Kree. Some
of her research was in Kree, which is how they found out. Lawson and a pilot,
<redacted>, were killed in a test flight of her experimental lightspeed
craft. Vers also recognizes another
pilot woman from her recovered memories named Maria Rambeau, and herself, in
one of the photos. The plot thickens.
Fury called in some SHIELD Agents
to help him capture and bring in Vers, but quickly discovers that Keller is a
Skrull. He used info about Skrull not being able to access older memories and uses
an inaccurate anecdote from their past to confirm it. Keller sends SHIELD
agents after them, but they’re able to slip by thanks to Coulson trusting Fury
over his orders. Fury and Vers escape using a Quadjet, a prototype to the
modern Quinjets. They look up Maria who is living in Louisiana with her
daughter.
Maria and her daughter, Monica, are
shocked to see her. Why? Because they knew Vers as Carol Danvers, a former
pilot, and Maria’s best friend. Vers… er Carol reconnects almost instantly with
Maria and Monica, the younger Rambeau not questioning at all how her supposedly
dead Auntie is back again. Their reunion is interrupted by Talos, who’d tracked
them down. He explains the situation. Turns out, the Kree have been executing a
genocidal campaign against the Skrull. The aliens have been running from planet
to planet trying to hide from them following the destruction of their
homeworld. More shockingly, Talos claims that Larson (in actuality a Kree named
Mar-Vell) betrayed the Kree and was helping the Skrull. As proof, Talos reveals
that he had the blackbox from Lawson’s downed plane. They play it for Carol,
which helps her to reclaim her memories. Turns out, after flying towards
Lawson’s ship, they were shot down by a Kree fighter. Lawson was morally
wounded in the crash but asks Carol to guard her research. Carol comes face to
face with Yon-Rogg, the leader of the Kree assault team. Carol shoots the core
of the ship, destroying it and infusing her with its energy. She was then taken
to Hala, had a control disk implanted on her neck and the rest is history. Back
in the present, Carol, Fury and Maria agree to help the Skrull get to
Mar-Vell’s ship and get them to a new home. Just in time for Yon-Rogg and his
team, along with Ronan the Accuser to arrive. Woo.
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| Dark Phoenix, eat your heart out. |
So, the good first. Brie Larson is
great as the good captain. She’s charismatic, likeable and yet damaged in a way
that is fun to watch. She and Samuel L. Jackson had a great chemistry to them,
it was an excellent buddy cop vibe between them. The effects were phenomenal,
that includes Carol’s energy blasts, the advanced Kree weapons, and the
de-aging effects on Samuel L. Jackson. Seriously, there were parts where I
couldn’t tell that they used CGI on his face. I liked the way that they shot
Carol’s various remembrances/dream sequences. They were just disjointed and
weird enough to seem like actual dreams at times. The jokes were also on point,
particularly with the Skrull. When the aliens land and assume human forms for
the first time they have a great “We’re wearing the same thing” moment to it.
The bad is minimal. The run time
made this a bit of a slog. Not too terrible, mind, there were just a few scenes
that needed to be cut down a little. Like the chase between Carol and Talos and
Fury, it just ran on a little too long. A lot of stuff was also thrown at us at
once. We not only had to learn a bunch of things about Kree culture and Hala,
but then more about Skrulls and the war with the Kree, and then readjust to 90s
LA once Carol gets there. And that’s all in the first act! Because of it,
certain awesome things about all the different elements are glossed over. Like
the Supreme Intelligence, a computerized amalgamation of all of the Kree’s
greatest minds is kind of just shoehorned in at the beginning and ending. We
also don’t get much info on the Kree-Skrull war, other than the Kree are trying
to wipe out the Skrull for reasons, and the Skrull just want to be left alone.
Not much to go on there. And there were the usual errors that always seem to
pop up with prequel movies. Like we’re expected to believe that Nick didn’t see
any superhumans between 1995 and 2008? Seriously? Also, if it bugs you that
some Kree like Yon-Rogg and Mar-Vell look European, while most other Kree are
blue… too bad, never explained.
Here’s a third category I’ll be touch
briefly on. These are elements I don’t think are particularly good or bad, just
things I noticed. I’ll start with an obvious one. They gender-swapped Mar-Vell.
In the comics, the alien spy turned superhero Mar-Vell had the civilian
identity of Dr. Walter Lawson, and was the on-again-off-again lover of Carol
Danvers for several years. I kind of liked this change, as it turned Mar-Vell
into more of a mentor character and largely removed any sort of romantic entanglements
from the film. Which I think was the right call, this thing would have been 2
and ½ or even three hours long if we had to work a romantic subplot in. And I’d
say this gender-swapping thing worked better here then, say, in Dr. Strange,
due in part to the fact they turned a white man into a white woman instead of
an Asian man into a white woman. Just saying. I’m also not sure how I feel
about shifting the Skrull completely from villains to victims. This is kind of
fitting, as in the comics, The Skrull only became a militaristic intergalactic
power after they met the Kree. The blue aliens turned a race of space merchants
into conquerors by necessity. Changing them into 100% victims means either the
Skrull are going to have a massive ideological shift somewhere over the lasts
thirty years in order to commence with the Secret Invasion or other Skrull
related story lines, or we're not going to be seeing the Skrull again.. The ideological shift isn't impossible, but it’d make the heel-face turn of Talos
and his ilk seem pointless.
Overall, I’m giving this one a B+.
It’s not the perfect film, but it’s a good Marvel movie. They had a lot of
things that they needed to do in a short amount of time, and while it was
clunky in places overall it was a fun ride. I think that Brie Larson’s Carol
will be an excellent addition to the Avengers roster and will be invaluable in
the fight against Thanos. I will say that I understand that this movie isn’t
for everyone and you have every right to not like it, from an artistic
standpoint. But, if your big issue was the fact that Brie is a bad ass woman, I
think the movie had an excellent answer to the trolls. Stop reading now if you
don’t want it spoiled. Have a good day, if you chose to stop early.
Stop it.
No complaining if you kept reading.
Okay, here it goes.
In the films climax, Carol faces
off against Yon-Rogg. The Kree pulls out his weaponry, and tries to egg her on.
To fight her like he trained her, to show her she’d mastered her emotions and
all that. No powers just fist to fist. Carol instead points a hand at Yonny and
blasts him into a cliff. She then walks over to him and calmly states, “I have
nothing to prove to you.” And that’s very true. She doesn’t have anything to
prove to anyone. She’s Carol Danvers, she’s going to kick butt and take names
whether anyone approves or not.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/25421542
Twitter: @BasicsSuperhero
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