#somebody literally went 'the line about hammers and nails is clearly a reference to the crucifixion of jesus'

[essektheylyss]

One of my favorite hobbies is opening the Genius annotations of lyrics I'm checking purely to roast the absolutely ATROCIOUS "analysis" some people throw up with full confidence on that site, oh my god.

[desperatelyseekingdennis]

Captain Marvel

I went into this expecting mediocrity, and was not disappointed. About on par with Ant Man and the Wasp, but without Paul Rudd to make it enjoyable.

Surprisingly, the soundtrack is absolutely the worst part of the movie. That's usually one area Marvel nails, but but here. They kept trying to use pop songs to tie the movie to the 90s, but none of them really fit the scenes. It's obviously possible to pull this off (Edgar Wright comes immediately to mind for another Ant Man comparison, or else various Iron Man scenes) so there's really no excuse.

Action and effects were passable, and the plot not the worst I've seen but still pretty bland. Despite getting a lot of screen time, I never noticed Jackson's de-aging. All told it wasn't a complete waste of money, but I definitely wish my girlfriend hadn't insisted on seeing it in the theater.

From here on out spoilers ahoy as I did deeper into my feelings about specific scenes.

(I started this right after the movie was released, and wrote a giant ten page analysis of the entire plot scene by scene.  I saved it to my drafts, forgot about it, then just now erased the entire thing and am going to try and be more focused on just the bits that don’t make sense to me)

So first of all, the “surprise twist” that drives the entire plot doesn’t work in the MCU.  The Kree have been villains in several live action properties at this point.  The entire plot to the first Guardians was that the Kree are so militaristic that a bunch of them refused to honor a peace treaty.  That they’re the put upon victims of the oppressive Skrulls just doesn’t work in this context.  Maybe if you’re a comic book fan who knows the Skrulls are *also* villains, but most viewers aren’t going to know that.  So it was obvious before they even reached Earth that Jude Law was the bad guy. They’d have been better served picking some other random alien race for her to be a part of.  Yes, I know Mar Vell is historically Kree, but he’s also historically male so clearly they don’t care that much about source material.  In a pinch, just make Mar Vell a Kree and these new guys are after her research.  

The premise that Danvers doesn’t know she’s human also doesn’t make much sense.  Did she never bleed in the six years of combat training?  Also, and maybe I’m overlooking something, but have there ever been any other white Kree?  There’s the one black guy, but even he has a sort of bluish tint.  Then there’s Jude Law and Carol being straight crackers.  ?????  Again, making not making them all Kree would have gone a long way towards fixing this.

Why did SHIELD show up at all?  Fury doesn’t believe Danvers is an alien when she claims to be one, so what exactly did they think was worth investigating?  They should have MIBed this bitch.  Either Fury is a cop that gets taken into SHIELD as a result of him killing a Skrull without training, or he’s the SHIELD agent that takes over after the cop on the scene does so.  I’m pretty sure Agents of SHIELD established that Coulson was an analyst before becoming a field agent, so using him for that roll doesn’t work well.  But given this was a GURL POWER movie, this would have been a fantastic opportunity to give Agent Hill some back story. 

In the train scene, how did she know to punch the old lady?  They’ve already established the Skrulls are so good at pretending that the Kree have to implant safe words deep in your subconscious to prove your identity, but for some reason she can spot one in a crowd of (what to her are) aliens?  For that matter, if they are telepathic, why could the one guy not identify that Fury doesn’t go by Nicholas?  That whole scene where he specifies that he only goes by Fury should have been pretty close to the surface. Even so, that scene was so bad.  It was so obviously tacked on to use as a plot device later.  The writers are aware that Fury has appeared in other movies, right? That he’s not an original character? What happened in the next twenty years that made him reevaluate people calling him Nick?  <Danvers reads his ID> “Thank’s Nicholas” “Only one person calls me Nicholas, and you aren’t my momma.  Its Fury.” Was that so hard?  

The scene with the biker was so bad.. It could have worked if they’d done something with the “why don’t you smile” line, but they didn’t.  He said it, end scene. ??? It also felt like it might have been a Terminator reference that also fell flat, but that might just be my imagination.  As it stands, it only serves as a wink and a nudge at their SJW targets, without actually providing anything for the rest of the audience.

Why is the light speed engine so important?  Mar Vell seems convinced it will bring peace to the galaxy, and Jude Law at least pretends to think it will allow them to conquer it.  But they already have the weird window portal things.  I guess the weird portals are static in space, so I can see where FTL travel independent of them would be beneficial, but hardly the game changer its being made out to be.

On the subject of pointless McGuffins, lets review the history of the Tesseract prior to this movie.  Odin loses it on Earth, where Red Skull discovers it  The Real Captain steals it from Red Skull, but loses it in the ocean where eventually Howard Stark will recover it and give it to SHIELD.  It stays with SHIELD until Loki steals it in the opening scene of the Avengers.  Its stolen like five more times before eventually Thanos uses it to murder Spiderman.  Nice chain of possession, no unexplained gaps.

Post Captain Marvel, we learn that along the way somehow the Air Force gets hold of it, where an alien managed to steal it and hide it on her space ship for at least six years before SHIELD, completely unaware of its existence, stumbles upon it.  Again, the writers are aware that there were other MCU movies before this one, right?  This isn’t really a problem per se, its just dumb.  Its answering a question nobody had, complicating a narrative for no reason except that they couldn’t come up with a non-Infinity Stone McGuffin.

When they fly into space and can’t find the space ship, Danvers is just like “Open sesame” and the ship decloaks.  ???  How worthless is Kree cloaking technology if it can be turned off remotely by somebody who doesn’t even know its there?  

It was pointed out on Twitter that the song the Supreme Intelligence dances to that she pulled out of Danver’s memories would have been released after Danvers moved to Hela. I can’t confirm that because I don’t remember what song was playing, but if true that’s pretty bad writing.  People will write it off as “she probably heard it in the car with Fury” but you can’t just invent a scene to fill in a plot hole.  That’s the writers’ job, and they didn’t do it.

There’s more to unpack in that Supreme Intelligence scene, but they mostly come down to “what are the rules of this technology?”  

Then the climax.  Oh my god the climax.  She thinks real hard and destroys the little chip that’s been blocking her powers (bee the dubs, until they explained otherwise I thought the little chip was the source of her powers), then suddenly she’s God.  No ramping up, no learning curve.  Just “oh, I can fly now and direct fire from a fucking attack cruiser doesn’t hurt me” and the movie is over.  What the actual fuck.  I can’t even put into words how bad the last act was.  

So I won’t.  Instead, I’ll talk about Thor: Ragnarok.  At the beginning of the movie, he’s cocky as hell.  He’s stupid over powered, and he knows it.  So when his sister appears he ends up losing his hammer because he’s so sure of himself that he doesn’t take a moment to think about the situation.  Then he winds up on the Junk Planet, and he’s still cocky.  He’s going to fight the champion and get off the planet then go kill his sister no big deal.  But he loses there, too.  He’s starting to lose faith in himself, but it doesn’t matter because he’s the only one that can do what needs to be done.  Finally he’s able to get off planet and back to his sister... Where he loses again. Now he’s hit rock bottom.  His people are going to die because he wasn’t strong enough to save them.  At that moment, he has a literal deus ex machina moment (in that Odin is a literal god) and regains all his power and proceeds to kick all the names and take all the ass.  (that was meant to be an Infinity War reference and not a suggestion about what his intentions re: Valkyrie, honest)  

At this point in the movie, he’s basically at the same level Danvers is at the end of hers.  Completely unstoppable, unreasonable power levels all around.  The difference is he earned his position.  He fought for it, almost died for it several times. Danvers just... thought real hard.  At any point in the movie did she lose a fight?  Was she ever in any real danger?  Even in the opening scene when she’s sparring with Jude Law its made clear that he’s incapable of beating her which is why he’s pushing her to learn to hold back.  And that’s with the power dampener.  Thor Ragnarok has *so* many problems, but at least they gave the hero a journey to go on.  And that’s accounting for the fact that he starts off pretty ridiculously powerful.  

I’m officially out of time and this is getting out of hand so I’m just going to wrap this up.  This was actually shorter than what I originally had.