The movie industry buzz on Captain Marvel is that it’s Marvel Comics’ long-awaited gender-friendly response to DC Comic’s hit movie Wonder Woman.
And that it is.
The Academy Award-winning Best Actress Brie Larson (2015's Room) plays the title role with confidence and style.
Let me begin by saying that comic book, superhero movies are like sushi meals: Either you like them or you don’t. There isn’t a lot of middle-of-the-road as far as their popularity is concerned.
Watch the film's trailer:
Captain Marvel is big-budget, adolescent fare. It involves broad, simple themes and lots of science fiction sound and thunder. There is always one overarching goal: A sequel.
Captain Marvel does all the requisite things superhero movies are supposed to do. The hero resolves the tortured beginnings of his or her origin story, and along the way just happens to save the universe from complete and utter destruction by green aliens who look like lizards or animated characters from a Mucinex commercial. Yay.
When we first meet Larson’s character, called Ver, she is living on another planet with people who call themselves Kree. Ver is complaining to her superior officer played by Jude Law, that she is haunted by a past of which she has no memory.
(POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT)
That past includes the fact that she once lived on earth and was a U.S. military fighter pilot named Carol Danvers. As fate would have it, her superior officer Wendy Lawson, played by Annette Bening (who looks likes she’s having a ball), is actually a Kree alien posing as human. Fun fact to know and tell: Krees look human, but they have green blood. Wendy involved Carol in a flight experiment that caused the Krees to take her back to their planet and raise her among them.
The Krees have an ongoing conflict with a competing alien race called Skrulls. They look like lizard demons and are shape shifters. They can take on the appearance of any other being they encounter. This becomes a cheap plot stunt in which any character onscreen may in fact be a Skrull alien. The movie really milks this ploy for all that it’s worth, which isn’t much.
To tell much more about the plot would ruin the story for anyone who cares about these kinds of movies. I’m not exactly the target demographic.
I really like sushi a lot. But as far as comic book superhero movies go -- and their singular devotion to the almighty sequel -- I just find them a little fishy.
Who: Directed by Anna Boden Ryan Fleck. Starring Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Jude Law, Annette Bening, Ben Mendelsohn Lashana Lynch and Gemma Chan
Rated: PG-13
Running time: 132 minutes
When: Opens Friday
Where: Area theaters
Grade: B
