Captain Marvel was released yesterday and I went to see it on the IMAX screen. The film is a bit of a mixed bag but overall I enjoyed it. The biggest strength the story has going for it is that rather than focus on the dull current Danvers series the filmmakers appropriated the original books concepts. The original concept of the book was that Mar-Vel was an alien living on Earth fighting a war and balancing their alliengence's to Earth and the Kree homeworld.
The Kree guard is led by Jude Law and features a band of warriors to varying degrees and powers as they battle the shapeshifting Skrulls led by Ben Mendelsohn. Sheninegans occur and she ends up in 1990's US where SHIELD's Samuel L Jackson and her end up working together as they are caught in this intergalactic battle. Oh and their is a cat named Goose and Danvers keeps seeing Annette Bennig in her head.
The film is sort of like a reverse Wonder Woman in the sense that the worst set pieces are in the beginning and then it gets progressively better. Nick Fury is a major figure in the film, this is practically an 80's buddy cop film and Jackson is very good. The characters are well defined to a point but here's the central fault in the film...it's Brie Larsen. I'm not going to pile onto to the Larsen backlash but you can't ignore that Danvers is smug and condescending throughout the film. Now most of the Marvel leads have a degree of smugness the difference is those characters are grounded with flaws and this film doesn't give Danvers any flaws. She's not broken like Doctor Strange or young like Spider-man or guilt-ridden like Tony Stark or a castout like Thor.
The other problem with the film is Lashana Lynch's character is basically just the black friend that reacts to everything and doesn't really do anything else. She pretty much just exists to be a mom and to show up in flashbacks. And while the film has a clear feminist agenda ultimately it fails women as the three male leads (Law, Mendlesohn, and Jackson) are all vastly superior characters that carry the film from being bleh to being a pretty good Marvel film.
Moving onto the films strengths, the 90's backdrop works really well. Anytime they end up picking up a piece of 90's nostalgia it ends up serving the plot. They also don't overdo it with the fashion which I appreciated. The film also does not have a villain problem Talos (Mendelsohn) is awesome his scenes are some of the best in the film. And while I can't express just how smug Danvers is her humor works at points, the final battle is pretty great and establishes what they were trying to do (though they did kind of fail at it).
At the end of the day the film is worth seeing
(though really it's more like 3.25