Captain Marvel review

Okay, now that that debt is paid, let’s move on. With Endgame nearly upon us, it’s high time I did this one for real.

Do you like action, excitement, some flashy effects, (mostly) tight scripting and some laughs? Well, you’ll probably like every Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, and Captain Marvel is no exception.

Captain Marvel takes place in the 90s, if you haven’t heard. What that means is after they’re done making the obligatory (and now very tiresome) Blockbuster and Radio Shack jokes, there’s a lot of MCU mythology to explore.

And, without going too deep into the details, Captain Marvel is a great example of making a prequel without having the various origins told be as irritating as Solo. Things come along pretty naturally, are occasionally played for laughs, but most importantly have a reason to last 20 years.

If teaser images and trailers got you excited to see 90s Agent Coulson, too bad. He’s barely in it. The vast majority of the Earth-bound portion of the movie is Captain Marvel and Nick Fury doing a buddy cop shtick, which they do well. With so much screen time for Fury, this really scratched my itch for a Nick Fury movie. You get the impression that Nicolas’ experiences in this movie really established a pecking order: He sees Captain Marvel as a partner, while the future Avengers are mere subordinates.

One of the big questions fans of the Marvel comics have had for as long as the MCU existed is whether the Skrulls will be involved and how. And after the Kree were referenced in the first season of Agents of SHIELD, it seemed all but certain the moral enemy of both the Kree and SHIELD must eventually show their shape-shifting faces. Captain Marvel finally takes the Skrulls into account, but flips the script in a way that just plain settles the issue without eliminating them for possible future movies.

I made a big deal with Aquaman’s box office because it was funny that the movie for one of the most-mocked superhero could outperform the apparently God-like Batman. While there’s no joke to make here, I do want to recognize that Captain Marvel really exploded off the blocks, and passed $1 Billion worldwide in about a month. From the studio that wouldn’t bring you Black Widow.

Marvel movies certainly enjoy a reputation as movies to just go see even if you’re not familiar with the source material, that by no means is the whole story. As Wonder Woman showed before, there is a VERY hungry audience for female-led action/superhero movies (that aren’t Lucy), which Hollywood probably swore off after Electra because they thought the problem was the lead and not that the movie just sucked.

Captain Marvel doesn’t devote a lot of time to playing to the audience, though it does bake overcoming sexism into her backstory as a central theme. This also includes perhaps the first time the word “cock” was used in a obscene manner in a Disney movie, which was honestly shocking even though it fit the scene.

It does get rather ham-fisted by the end, though. After remembering endless memories of facing sexism from her past on Earth, Captain Marvel lets it all out in a triumphant action scene set to No Doubt’s “I’m Just a Girl” against… the aliens who, while deceptive and controlling, not once ever treated her in a sexist manner. It was a fantastic setup, complete with a “fall nine times, get up 10” montage the movie had been foreshadowing the heck out of up to this point, but it would have landed so much better if her curb-stomp targets actually played an active role in the buildup.

Verdict: Go for it (4/5). Upgrade it to Must-See if you’re a MCU fan, because it’s in the top tier of them. However, it may be too steeped in continuity for a newcomer to enjoy several chunks of it.