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Captain Marvel Movie Review Spoilers

Captain Marvel introduces a new character into the already well established MCU and struggles to be a character people care for.

While Captain Marvel is a badass superhero who does some serious ass kicking, she lacks any empathy people could feel for her. While I’m myself a very emotional movie goer who cries at virtually every minor human conflict in every movie there is, Captain Marvel only managed to make me tear up on one occasion. While that’s a very subjective assessment it does say a lot about the movie. The movie has a rather weak opening, compared to the recently released DC Superhero Movie Aquaman it doesn’t capture the audience from the very beginning but rather leaves them hanging waiting for the feeling of having arrived in her world. The audience is waiting for the ‘I’m about to go on an adventure’ moment for essentially the whole movie. I never got to the stage of being completely invested in her story which usually happens at least at the end of the first act of a movie. Aquaman is a good example of a very immersive opening scene by opening Aquaman’s journey with a loud bang of a window blind slamming against a wall during a heavy storm. American Animals is another good example of a completely immersive opening, where over the course of a couple minutes the moviegoers are immediately captured by the story and intrigued. At the end of the scene the audience has arrived in the world of the protagonists and thereon begins the adventure. 

Sadly Captain Marvel doesn’t do that to the point that I barely remember how it begins and I left the theater roughly 3 hours ago. The opening sequence is interrupted by her waking up and revealing that she just had a bad dream. She then continues to look for Jude Law’s character Yon Rogg and their first interaction already tells you what kind of Character Carol Danvers is, she’s kind of sarcastic and has a dry humor I would say which I normally prefer and can relate to. However the first words she said  didn’t do anything for me and most of the audience members and I thought it was very bland and uninteresting. This conversation sets the tone for the rest of the movie. It’s not that she’s not funny or annoying or a bad person, but she has nothing distinctive to her. Anyone could’ve said these things, they’re not unique to her character. I know that it was only two lines but my point is that that’s how it continues. She does get funnier and more charismatic when she interacts with Fury and I do think that these scenes make her likeable and give her a certain edge, however these moment are quite rare and any other dialogue she has or decisions she makes are simply boring and almost predictable. I did enjoy that she feels like more of the girl next door type of character, as opposed to Gal Gadot’s Wonderwoman for example,which would make her more relatable, but somehow it doesn’t fit the story. They try to give her a backstory and some motivation but the scenes where they do try are never paid off. We see a couple flashbacks over and over again where she fails at go-karting or rope climbing, and they are supposed to be symbolic for her being human and never giving up, but the audience doesn’t feel that. To me it just showed that she fell down a couple of times and got up again but there’s no real plot twist in that narrative. They show a man in the Airforce telling her that she can’t control her emotions and therewith won’t ever be any good as an army pilot, but that moment is never paid off. In the first act they push the story line of her not being able to control herself because there’s more to her than being a fighter, like emotions and a moral compass, they just don’t bring that across. The pay off for all these scenes is the moment where she stands up to the higher intelligence by accepting that she’s human and therewith unlocks her full powers. It sounds great on paper but in reality the scenes didn’t do anything to the spectators. The person she stood up to has almost no significance, and it just continues the repeatedly shown narrative of her getting back up after she’s been down but we still don’t really understand her motivation. Also she doesn’t face any obstacles of trying to unlock her powers, she just does so by using them to its full extent. The idea of her humanity being the main hardship she has to battle with isn’t shown in an emotionally investive manner, she just says it. They showed her struggle with coming to terms with who she is in a way better sequence when Maria Rambeau tells her that she’s there for her and emphasizes on their strong friendship in the past. Maria Rambeau is the best written and most human character in the movie in my opinion. I truly feel for her and because she’s such a great character her words towards Carol have such a big influence that she is able to benefit from them and show her vulnerable human side, but unfortunately that’s the only thing where we see it because the climax just uses dialogue without any emotionally investing background. That was also the only moment that made me tear up because you could feel the confusion and hopelessness Carlos must’ve felt the whole time, discovering she was  brainwashed for the past six years and missed out on this great connection with Monica.

Another reason why the movie feels a little shallow are the stakes, who are basically non existent. I know that a lot of people say there aren’t ever real stakes in a Marvel movie which I fundamentally disagree with, BUT in this one there really aren’t any. She is already super powerful at the very beginning of this movie, and we’ve seen in the trailer that she can fly. Even without seeing the trailer they tease from the very beginning that she’s even stronger than we see in the first parts of the movie because characters like Yon-Rogg continuously tell her to hold back. Her ‘opponents’ don’t really seem to have any superpowers and she can easily overpower them mostly even in hand to hand combat. She’s never in any real danger which wouldn’t really be a problem if there were other obstacles she has to overcome but as I already stated her back story doesn’t really work and doesn’t prevent her from kicking ass at all. There’s no real inner or outer conflict. The big enemy Ronan just flees the scene upon seeing her powers, which is kinda cool at first glance and symbolizes how powerful she really is but it’s also insanely underwhelming. It’s very atypical for these powerful characters to just give up that easily. Imagine the Avengers just fleeing the scene everytime they see someone more powerful than them . Every Avengers movie would result in them giving up. I know that there’s more complexity in Avengers’ motives of why they keep fighting even in hopeless situations, but Ronan giving up that easily just seems like lazy writing and he’s only being used to demonstrate how powerful Captain Marvel is supposed to be, which just makes him a disposable plot device. The moment where she discovers her true strength comes as no surprise and there’s not even a visually satisfying scene of her coming into her full powers, other than the one we’ve already seen in the trailer countless times and a short cool scene of her falling, her eyes lighting up and realizing that she can fly. Also her powers aren’t very well established I still don’t know what her powers actually are, they seem boring and that thing she did which resulted in Ronan leaving was very abstract and not really a tangible concept to grasp, which I do realize sounds ridiculous because it’s a Superpower, but it still leaves me kinda confused of how she would for example try to defeat Thanos. I don’t know the full scope of her powers, other than people outside of the movie telling me that she’s supposed to be the strongest Avenger.

Talking about the visuals is also important when reviewing this movie. They’re just kinda bland. The only visually pleasing scenes are of her flying into space and preventing Ronan’s bombs to hit earth, but it’s too short and the badassness and the seriousness of her powers and that moment are taken away by her screaming about how much fun she’s having. Now it is a fun character trait to include her acting like that but it seems out of character, because she’s never seemed like the ‘screaming because of happiness’ type of character. Also in comparison to Thor in Ragnarok, who became this really funny goofy character, he doesn’t squeal of joy when he unlocks his full powers on the rainbow bridge. It’s a serious moment, it’s life or death for his people, but these stakes and the seriousness is never present in the third act of Captain Marvel.

To add another comparison of these two movies, Captain Marvel doesn’t really have a tone. It has semi grungy visuals but that’s it as far as that goes. Certain parts of the movie are too dark, like the very first Starforce mission and Captain Marvels battle against the Starforce at the end of the movie. The music isn’t special but a rather obvious choice and sometimes doesn’t go with the scenes at all. For example when Carol has to fight Yon-Rogg and the Starforce on Lawson’s Ship. The music and the seriousness and badassness of the scene don’t go together at all. The visuals alone can’t carry the theme of the movie and much like in the first Thor movie they chose a location that’s rather bland to begin with, which is parts of Los Angeles where you don’t see any landmarks and then somewhere in the desert. The switch from a beautiful outer space civilization to the plain desert hasn’t worked in Thor and didn’t work in Captain Marvel either. On top of that the space station of Dr. Lawson felt like an unfinished set piece in my opinion. It was just a room with space ship looking like walls and a couple of artifacts from earth randomly placed in the room, it again didn’t have a distinctive feeling to it, nor did it set any specific atmosphere for the scenes.The MCU has stepped up its game and knows what it’s doing with essentially every movie but Captain Marvel doesn’t portray that and feels very forgettable. If that was the first superhero movie I’ve ever seen I would’ve been amazed but only because of the visuals and because she’s a superhero and that’s always exciting. But we’re long past that. We live in a post Infinity War era, where Superhero movies have exceeded their genre and they tell the most human and grand and mind blowing stories in cinematic history. At first it might just be unfair to expect such a standard from an origin movie, but then I realized that I can still go back to Dr. Strange or Black Panther and be just as excited for their story as I was when I watched them the first time and they totally hold up even in the face of Infinity war, so Captain Marvel really has to step her game up, other heros have done it too. I really wanted to see the movie succeed considering Carol Danvers is going to be part of the MCU for a while now but I was disappointed. It was still an entertaining movie at times and I don’t regret going to the movies to see it but at its best it’s just mediocre which no superhero in the MCU deserves at this point. Captain Marvel is going to join the Avengers in Endgame and I hope that she’ll be ‘Russo’d’ just like Cap, Spider-man and Thor. I still believe in Marvel to make the right decisions to bring a glorious end to the first 10 years of the MCU. The clock to Endgame has begun !

Overall score: solid 5/10 

Quick complaints and thoughts:

(Goose’s eye-scratching scene should have happened at a different time in the movie, it felt kinda forced and short cut, but I liked the idea)

(The Avengers Initiative being named after Captain Marvel felt a little disrespectful to all the other heroes we’ve been with for the past 10 years, just didn’t feel deserved)

(Coulson was way underwritten, but I liked him more than I did in The Avengers)

(Did they have to release Captain Marvel before Endgame because they needed to introduce Goose as a Flerken in order to use her dimensional pockets to defeat Thanos ??)