The Mediocrity of ‘Captain Marvel’

• Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck
• February 27, 2019 (London) / March 8, 2019 (US)

An amnesiac alien soldier discovers she is actually human and a pawn in a conflict between two warring species.

Visually Captain Marvel is pretty good. The heavy CGI still holds up unlike some more recent efforts. And honestly the story starts on a strong note. The initial set up is good but the narrative declined rapidly once the story gets to Earth and they keep beating you over the head with how it’s set in the 1990s and how awesome Carol Danvers/Vers/Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) is in comparison to every other character who all are simply crafted as weaker and generally more incapable than Carol Danvers/Vers/Captain Marvel is.

They go very heavy with how jerky men are to Carol Danvers/Vers/Captain Marvel. I’m not saying there are not sexist men out there and I’m not saying women can’t be awesome but the way it is done here is just done poorly. But that’s what you get when you put message before story. If you have a message that’s fine but when your message overwhelms the storytelling then it borders on a lecture. 

This may be a seem a little off topic but hear me out. If you ever watch a Steven Seagal movie one thing you’ll notice is that they all have at the minimum one scene where the characters sit around and talk about how awesome Steven Seagal’s character is. While those are there to stroke his ego, they also harm the overall narrative because what is going on is so blatantly obvious. Captain Marvel has multiple moments where a character or characters talk about how awesome Carol Danvers/Vers/Captain Marvel is. Don’t tell us how awesome a character is. Show us.

Carol Danvers/Vers/Captain Marvel is supposed to have all these close relationships. She’s supposed to have a close relationship with Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) and her daughter Monica (Akira Akbar). But it doesn’t feel like that. Maybe it’s because they spend a lot of time talking about how awesome Carol Danvers/Vers/Captain Marvel is rather than demonstrating a bond through actions. It felt a bit like fake hero worship and not a genuine relationship.

I understand this is Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) before we met him in the previous Marvel movies but I’m not sure how we get from this to the guy that broke into Tony Stark’s house to talk to him about the Avenger’s Initiative. He borders on comedic and shows no indications of being hyper paranoid or able to assess the situation vastly better than anyone else. And his goofy obsession with cats is more a joke than anything. It all makes him silly.

From a plot perspective I have a little trouble understanding why Yon-Rogg (Jude Law) was Vers’s handler while she thought she was Vers and Kree. He is the one that caused her amnesia and would be an emotional trigger to recover memory yet he is the one in charge of controlling this potential superweapon. Not only did he cause her amnesia, but he killed her personal hero Mar-Vell whom she knew as Dr. Wendy Lawson (Annette Bening) when he shot them down. That is a great deal of baggage to connect to one being.

Ben Mendelsohn as Talos and Keller starts as intelligent but devolves into almost a joke to where you’re wondering how he’s leading anybody against anything. They feel the need to make him more humorous as the movie goes on and if you’re going for the leader of something that doesn’t work.

There is a bit of an art to setting a film in the recent past. Some directors can get it right by dropping just enough hints that remind you while others drown you in the era and director Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck drown you in the 90s. It feels forced and unnecessary. The song choices feel random, and the number of songs used are ridiculously high.

The character of Captain Marvel has a microchip on the back of her neck which inhibits or limits her abilities. That device is poorly explained. Apparently aware of it the whole time she proceeds with it on the back of her neck until the finale when she needs to power up and do cool looking stuff at max abilities rather than take it off when she realizes that what she thought was the situation was not the situation. 

The ending is a bit of a letdown. There’s no real final confrontation between Yon-Rogg and Captain Marvel. She just tosses him in a pod and sends him on his way. Admittedly she was hugely overpowered by that point and Yon-Rogg was no match for her either intellectually or just her ability to fight. The villain was all around no match for the hero and you try to figure out how he or anyone else was a problem. Captain Marvel just ends anti-climactically. And that is on top of the revelation over Fury’s eye. It had been hypothesized what happened and that became much greater than anything the writers of this movie could imagine. A story is only a smart is those writing it and if the people aren’t that smart or creative then neither is the story or any revelations.

I was certainly thrilled during the action scenes, but this is a movie you need to turn your brain off in order to actually enjoy. And while I do like movies like that, it doesn’t work in this case. Mostly because it’s presented as if you shouldn’t turn your brain off. It isn’t done to be stupid but rather done because the people making this think they are being smart. 

This is a movie that looks good and has good moments but is often undone with heavy handed attempts at message as well as establishing the era in which it takes place. And it makes others weaker to make the main character look strong along with using Steven Seagal methods to drive home how awesome the title character is. And characters do dumb things that they try to make look smart.

Captain Marvel is a visually stunning film with some great action but is undone by a poor execution of the story as well as unnecessary elements. You won’t be completely disappointed when you watch this, but it’s not worth seeking out unless you’re going to watch the sequel. Otherwise skip it.