So of course like any movie starring a female lead these days, there now has to be a controversy surrounding it. Because we live in a world of butthurt people who love to bitch about anything and everything that offends them. And everything offends them. But it’s more than that, they don’t just get upset about it, but stew over it and dwell over it like a disgruntled mass shooter in the making. It becomes their whole identity.
Of course I’m talking about SJW’s vs. Incels! Or white nationalists. Or menist. Or whatever you want to call the other side of the argument. Normally when you a have a group of angry white guys, they’re usually classified as a hate group, so what to call this particular group is up in the air.
The thing both groups don’t seem to get however is they’re different sides of the same annoying coin. And honestly both sides can go fuck themselves.
They’re the same people that got angry about the Ghostbusters remake, the videogame Battlefield V, and a whole slew of other things that don’t matter.
That’s the problem with YouTube or Twitter, it gives a voice to people who shouldn’t have a voice. These people usually stay on their designated websites, so the rest of us don’t have to hear them. But now they’re everywhere like fucking measles because moms won’t vaccinate their kids!
It’s also why Netflix has a flat earther documentary on it or why flat earthers even still exist in 2019. I mean, with sound reasoning like, I don’t believe science or facts, just what I can see with my own eyes, I mean of course that gets a following.
The only reason I’m aware of the “controversy” surrounding Captain Marvel is thanks to YouTube. I watch one video on it from some asshole neckbeard and now I get recommended a whole bunch of videos on the topic from even more angry neckbeards.
Like when I watched one video on removing barnacles from sea turtles, so now I get suggested nothing but videos about barnacles on turtles.
The thing you have to realize is the world is full of stupid and crazy ass fucking people who all think they should be heard. And it’s now easier for these crazy assholes to find each other.
I guess with all these people claiming to boycott this movie, it must have bombed at the box office, right?
Hmmm… $153 million on opening day, I guess people didn’t get the memo they should be boycotting this movie.
I can get behind boycotting places like Chick-fil-A, I mean, who makes a chicken sandwich and not put mayo on it? That’s fucking insane and should be boycotted.
Looking past all the noise surrounding this movie, forgetting all the fat angry neckbeards and angry white ladies that don’t shave, just how is Captain Marvel? You know, like as an actual movie and not as some prop to toss your political beliefs behind.
Well…
It’s still a Marvel superhero movie, so by that standard it’s still good, but it has some issues. Mainly poor directing, poor writing, and some poor casting choices. And by poor casting choices, I’m mostly referring to Brie Larson, who kind of sucks in this.
A lot of that also has to do with how her character is written. I don’t know who her character really is, she’s kind of all over the map when it comes to personality.
We get very little background on her, since this is an origin story, I think those things are kind of important.
We see her past in quick Man of Steel style flashbacks, because our main character has amnesia. And I think remains to have amnesia even after the film ends. She’s just a character who doesn’t know who she is, so is therefore everything?
She tries being a badass, a wisecracker, a Thor-like character, a bunch of things, none of it all that interesting however.
It’s also slightly annoying they’re just now bringing this overpowered character into the cinematic universe. Hell, the whole Avengers program was based on her, which I guess makes her the first Avenger. Another example of a woman taking a man’s job, right Captain America?
Joking, though it does seem like they’re retconning a few things to try and include her into the story.
Before I dive into the story, can I talk about the trailer for the upcoming Spider-man movie? Why are we getting trailers for this before Endgame comes out? It seems to be a prequel, since spoilers, Peter Parker dies at the end of Infinity War.
But from what I’m hearing, it takes place right after Endgame. So… why are they showing us events that happen after a film that hasn’t come out yet? A film that leaves on a pretty big cliffhanger.
So you already know now that things work out for everybody in Endgame, they reset the world and stopped Thanos.
It’s like in Captain Marvel, trying to make it seem like we don’t already know the Kree are the bad guys. They reveal this to us like we are meant to be shocked by this turn of events. Even though we learned this way back in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie. Hell, I think even before that on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. we knew the Kree were bad guys.
The movie makes it so you already know things about the story and about the characters before they do, so we’re just waiting for everyone else in the movie to catch up with us.
Also on a technical side, I found the film so dark in scenes that it made the film hard to watch, especially since those scenes were usually action sequences. The added shakycam didn’t help matters either.
The year is 1995, our main character is Carol Danvers aka Vers aka Captain Marvel, played by Brie Larson. To make things simpler, I’ll just refer to only as Captain Marvel.
Captain Marvel belongs to a Kree Special Forces unit that helps fight the war with the Skrulls, another alien race that can mimic the appearance of anyone. Even though they look a lot like Piccolo in the live-action Dragon Ball movie.
Captain Marvel has been having nightmares, so to help shake them off, she goes to Jude Law’s character Yon-Rogg to help keep her mind in check with a little friendly sparring.
Captain Marvel has to see the Supreme Intelligence, an artificial intelligence that rules over the Kree. This should have been a huge indicator right there that maybe the Kree aren’t on the up and up. No one good has an AI overlord.
When the Kree Supreme Intelligence shows itself, it comes to you as someone important from your past, but since Captain Marvel doesn’t remember her past, she has no clue who the Supreme Intelligence is coming to her as.
Maybe I missed something, but it makes it seem like the Supreme Intelligence is giving her her very first mission. When it seemed like they’ve been at this for a while now.
Their mission is to rescue an undercover Kree agent.
Now this is the one of two scenes where the darkness really made it hard to see what was going on. I thought maybe something was off with the projector but I asked a few others who saw the movie and they all noticed the same thing as I did.
The Special Forces team holds off the advancing Skrulls while Captain Marvel goes to grab the agent, only for it to be a trap. She is taken by the Skrulls where they use a device to help see into her lost memories, looking for something on earth.
She breaks free and her and the rest of the Skrulls crash land on earth.
A digitally deaged Samuel L. Jackson as a young Nick Fury shows up investigating her crash landing.
Somehow Captain Marvel is able to slap together a communication device out of parts she found at a Radio Shack. Are Radio Shacks still around? I thought they were. I remember going to one not long ago looking for a HDMI splitter, which was like $30 more than any other place. If they did go out of business, I can see why.
Captain Marvel and Fury team up once a Skrull attacks them, putting the pieces together that they are after Annette Bening’s character Dr. Wendy Lawson, the same person Captain Marvel sees whenever she visits the Supreme Intelligence.
During her random Man of Steel flashbacks, we learn that Captain Marvel was Carol Danvers, a US military pilot who went missing like 6 years ago after her and Dr. Wendy Lawson were piloting a new experimental aircraft that crashed.
I guess she didn’t go missing exactly, but presumed dead since all they found of her was her charred dog tags.
The Skrull want Dr. Wendy Lawson’s research, as she was actually a Kree spy, working on something to end the war, a way for the Skrull to travel far far away from the Kree’s reach.
And the crash is how Captain Marvel gained her powers. How? I still have no clue, she shoots it so the Kree can’t have the tech, and it blows up in her face kind of Hulk style.
It damaged her memories but gave her superpowers, which have been suppressed by the Kree to keep her under control.
Learning all this, she teams up with the Skrulls to find the cloaked spaceship drifting above earth. Inside they find the rest of the Skrulls and the Tesseract, the first of the infinity stones we are introduced to.
So now like Avatar or this little known PS3 game called Haze, our lead finds out the side she is on is the bad one and switches allegiances with the enemy.
Now she has to fight off her old squad mates. This is the second scene where it gets too dark at times to see what is happening. It’s on a dark space ship and all her team mates are wearing very dark crushed green colors, and again, the shakycam didn’t help… oh and for some extra unneeded cringe, they play No Doubt’s Just a Girl song.
She wears a Nine Inch Nails shirt throughout the entire time she’s on earth and we couldn’t get one song? I’d much rather hear Closer playing over a fight scene than fucking No Doubt. Just imagine it, I wanna fuck you like an animal, playing as she jets around space, destroying spaceships with her fists…
I guess that’s what fan edits are for.
Anyway, Captain Marvel breaks free from the Kree inhibitor that was holding her back, which she easily just pulled from her neck, and she becomes Ms. Overpowered, capable of doing all the things.
But still keeping that dumb as hell Mohawk on her mask. It looks so bad and hilarious, it made me chuckle each time she whips it out.
The Kree forces are defeated and the Skrull are now able to travel to where they can’t be hunted, with Captain Marvel’s help.
And that’s where the film ends. She goes off to help the Skrulls, Nick Fury loses an eye to a cat and gives Marvel his pager in case of an emergency. The end.
Well, then there’s the after credit scene that picks up right after the events of Infinity War, with the remaining Avengers trying to figure out Fury’s pager.
Only to have Captain Marvel show up to investigate.
I didn’t hate the film, but it did seem like the audience I was watching it with in the theater were watching a completely different movie than I was.
They clapped, oh did they clap during moments. The beginning with Stan Lee, the cameo by Stan Lee and then as the film ended like they just watched this cinematic masterpiece.
To me, the movie felt off. Something about it just wasn’t working. It was very generic sure but the characters and their dialogue… like their poor attempt at humor always fell flat on its face.
Even Nick Fury didn’t act like Nick Fury. I get that this is a younger version of him but nothing too drastic happened that it would have changed him that much, at least not into the person/character we know. The only reason he lost an eye was because of an alien cat but even that didn’t seem to bother him all that much. He even kept the cat in the end.
It’s also one of the very few Marvel films without any kind of romance to it. Captain America had Peggy Carter, Tony Stark had Pepper Potts, Thor had Jane Foster, Ant-Man has the Wasp, Starlord has Gamora … the list goes on.
Why not have Captain Marvel be in a relationship with Jude Law’s character? So when she finds out that he has been lying to her Total Recall style, it gives her more of a reason of feeling betrayed and wanting to kick his ass.
It’s just another example of this character being bland, with nothing really to her other than she sometimes gets back up when knocked down.
So how does this compare to DC’s attempt at a female superhero movie like Wonder Woman? Is it better or worse? Well… even that is hard to answer.
I liked most of Wonder Woman, though really it was about as good as a lesser Marvel film. But even that had some romance in it. It also had a better idea of who the characters were. Not to mention had much better directing and writing… for the most part, since the film did fall apart towards the end.
But is it better than Captain Marvel?
Captain Marvel has the added benefit of being a small piece in the grand Marvel Cinematic Universe, where Wonder Woman was a part of… well, you know. We won’t get into that now, as I’m sure there will plenty of chances to bring it up during my Shazam! review.
By proxy, Captain Marvel is slightly better than Wonder Woman I’m afraid.
However, Captain Marvel is only getting a RENT IT rating from me.
I don’t think this is one you need to rush out to theaters to see. It might be important to try to see it before Endgame comes out, just so you have an inkling as to who this overpowered character that came out of nowhere is. But besides that, just do what Hank does and wait until it’s on Netflix.
Speaking of, next week I’ll be reviewing the Ben Affleck Netflix original film Triple Frontier.
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