I saw it this weekend with my daughter, and we both agreed that it wasn’t nearly as bad as the haters made it sound. It wasn’t great, but it was okay, and I actually liked the non-traditional way it unveiled Marvel’s origin story (which is a bit messy in the film but is also pretty messy in the comics as well). But I do have some other comic- and movie-nerd complaints.
Here with some notes (with spoilers):
- I find almost all of the feminist commentary pro-and-con pretty much irrelevant and worthless. I didn’t think Brie Larson was as vapid as Sonny makes her out to be, but she certainly wasn’t as charismatic as her boosters had claimed.
- I’m getting kind of sick of the “follow the bouncing tesseract” game.
- I hated the backstory on how Nick Fury lost his eye. It was supposed to be in combat.
- They did some heroic work on making Samuel L. Jackson look young. The most obvious giveaway of his actual age was when you saw him run. He runs like a 70-year-old.
- Captain Marvel’s actual origin — I mean when and how she gets her actual powers — is pretty dumb. Worse, it’s still unclear what her actual powers are. My daughter “Why can she fly now?”
- It seems like they never got around to explain why she took the name Captain Marvel when “Mar-Vel” is not actually her last name.
- But all of this is mere throat clearing to my biggest complaint. I have no problem with making the Kree villains, that’s fair enough. But turning the Skrulls into intergalactic Syrian refugees was infuriating on several fronts. First of all, the Skrulls are canonically bad guys. Second, the movie did a great job of depicting them as such in the first half, and I was looking forward to future plots where the Skrulls joined up with Hydra and whatnot. By turning them into victims, Marvel unilaterally surrendered fantastic future material.