RageLite review: Captain Marvel

We’ve got one more MCU film to look at before we get to the big one and that’s Captain Marvel.

We got a teaser for her at the End of Infinity War and people were anticipating her solo outing that would follow up on this. But then Brie Larson had some feminist opinions and the idiots of the internet started spreading fallacies and garbage about her, and if you are one of those people, please stop reading now. I could spread more colourful insults, but you’re not worth the effort.

For those of you who are still reading, you’ll be pleased to know this didn’t affect the bottom line, the film made over $1bn at the box office, being the first female-led superhero film to do so. Yes, it beat out Wonder Woman. It got a reasonable critical reception, a 78% rating with an average 6.8/10 score. I’m not gonna bother with the audience score because of everything I just said in the last paragraph.

The film has 5 writers, which is not usually a good sign. They include Meg LaFauve, who had been involved writing Inside Out and Good Dinosaur for Pixar, Nicola Perlman who was a writing consultant on Thor and co-wrote Guardians of the Galaxy, Geneva Robertson-Dworet, who wrote the Tomb Raider reboot film, she also wrote the screenplay with the directing duo Anna Bolden and Ryan Flek, who and written and directed several smaller films prior to this. Does this approach pay off? Here are my thoughts:

Our main character is introduced as Vers (pronounced Veers) (Brie Larson), she’s a member of the Kree Starforce with special abilities and a lack of memory of anything that happened prior to 6 years ago. She is being trained by Yon-Rogg (Jude Law) and apparently has issues keeping her emotions in check, I say apparently because this isn’t really demonstrated in the movie and I feel might just be a lie to get to her to not feel at all.

When a mission to extract an agent who’d been tracking a race of shape-shifting aliens called the Skrulls goes wrong, Vers gets captured by said Skrulls and begins to see more fragments of her lost memories, she soon winds up on Earth and must identify who the skrulls are, what they want as well finding out the secrets of her lost part.

OK, I’m going to stop calling her Vers now, and use her real name of Carol Danvers for the rest of the review. This a middle of the road Marvel film if I’m honest, but there are certainly some positives. First off, Samuel L Jackson is back as a digitally de-aged Nick Fury and he provides some of the best comedy of the film. The connection between him and Carol is believable, neither are entirely trusting of one-another to start with but as things get more and more out of hand, although they’re still taking the odd pot-shot. It's a fun buddy-cop routine

Goose, the tentacle hentai monster that normally looks like a cat is absolutely adorable. I absolutely love Annette Benning as both the Kree Supreme Intelligence and Marr-Vell. She toes the line of being odd without being inhuman (ha) and it’s kinda funny hearing the Supreme Intelligence trying to be intimidating with this voice.

Ben Mendelsohn is brilliant as Telos, the head of the skrulls, and it’s interesting that they chose to have the Skrulls actually be the good guys, it does kinda spit in the face of the comics, and robs the narrative of potential complexity but it’s my favourite Ben Mendelsohn performance so far and even without the Skrulls being full on villains, they do manage to create a sense of paranoia about who could be Skrull after the whole train sequence.

Akira Akbar was absolutely adorable as Monica, it’s sad that the timelines mean we probably won’t see her this age again. I did enjoy the chemistry between Carol and Maria Rambeau, another credit to the actor, Lashana Lynch. The Marvel quality when it comes to production design and special effects is maintained for the most part in this film.

As a story, the plot is conventional to say the least, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it means we have more time to do world-building, character interactions and the tesseract being here for some reason (did Mar-Vell fish it out of the HYDRA wreckage?) but I do have my problems, and as much as I hate to say, it starts with Brie Larson’s performance

Now, let me be clear, Brie Larson is not a bad actor, she’s won awards so I put this as much down to how her character was written and directed but it’s a wooden performance. Carol rarely shows much emotion, her reactions to the tragedy around her seem stoic and best, even when she has to completely re-write her own worldview in her head.

She also comes off as somewhat cocky and arrogant, and whilst that’s not an uncommon trait of Marvel (Thor and Iron Man had this in their first movies too, still do but toned down in subsequent films) it does need to be addressed in the sequel.

And then there’s the villains. If they were going for a twist villain with the Kree, the comics and 5 seasons of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. spoiled that pretty quickly. And I just don’t particularly care about Yon-Rogg. He’s a cog in a machine and we know next to nothing about him, there’s some indication of a relationship with ‘Vers’ but I feel this might’ve been him leading her on. The accusers are just there to be someone for Carol to blow up.

And that’s another problem with the threat level in this film. Carol didn’t even struggle to fight her way through a Skrull ship with her arms bound, why is a single Skrull on a train a threat? Of course, there’s the inhibitor on her neck which only factors into the plot when they need her to stay captured for 5 minutes. None of the action scenes make you feel like Carol was in genuine danger. Given the major power upgrade they gave Carol for these films, they needed a threat to match, maybe a physical encounter with an accuser, or something that does affect Carol psychologically (Yon-Rogg tries and fails to do this at the end)

Captain Marvel is a good Marvel film, it’s got the usual brand of humour down, and mostly decent performances and effects but more needed to be done with the villains to make them interesting or threatening and more opportunities for Brie Larson to emote would’ve been appreciated.

Rating 65/100