Movie Review: Captain Marvel

Let’s get straight into it. We meet Vers (pronounced ‘Veers’; played by Brie Larson), a Kree warrior who has lost her memory and has no recollection about her life growing up – what she does have is odd dreams. When we meet her, she’s part of a little warrior group, led by Yon-Rogg (Jude Law), that goes on a mission to retrieve a spy/agent from within enemy Skrull territory. There is a skirmish and Skrull-ian (is that right?!) Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) tries to extract something from Vers’ memories – which turns out to be quite significant, we realise, as time goes by. She eventually escapes and crash lands on planet C-53 – Earth. As do some Skrulls, including Talos. It’s where she meets Nicholas Fury (Samuel Jackson) and Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg); Fury and her go on a mission to hunt out the alien infiltrators, while she waits to be rescued by the Kree. Along the way, her memories, seemingly from her time on Earth as Air Force pilot Carol Danvers, start returning. She also meets her friend Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch), whom she doesn’t remember, who helps Danvers out during the journey she’s on. And obviously, everything is not as it seems…

So Captain Marvel was a movie I went into without having watched a single trailer. So I had no reference, other than it was based in the 90s, and it was the person Fury paged before disappearing at the end of Infinity War. I didn’t go in with a lot of expectations also because it’s a female-led MCU movie and I did not want to be burned if it was bad.

While the movie is no Black Panther or Infinity War or Thor: Ragnarok or Winter Soldier, the movie is a decent origins movie. What I loved was the digital alteration of Jackson and Gregg – they really looked naturally decades younger and I soon forgot they’re actually much older than they appear in the movie. The buddy relationship between Jackson and Larson was awesome too. I loved the 90s, retro vibe – Danvers crashes into a Blockbuster, there’s a Radio Shack, and only people who used the internet in the 90s will know the frustrations of dial-up. There’s a great plotline with a cat, ‘Goose’, which helps tie up a couple of loose threads in the story (you’ll know these when you see them on screen). I also loved that there was no love interest for Carol Danvers in the film. Thank you, story writers, for not having a male OR female relationship as motivation for her actions. It’s hard not to cheer when you see Danvers free herself from the shackles (literally and metaphorically) placed on her – both as a human and as a Kree. As she said, she had been fighting with “one hand tied behind” her back. And now she’s free to use her power as it was meant to be.

Sure there were a few bits where I thought, hang on, why did that character do THAT? Or places where I thought, wait I don’t get the point of this… but does it detract from the movie to the point where I disliked it? Not at all. There are still mysteries to be solved, especially around where Danvers has been from the time of this movie until Infinity War, and why she hasn’t appeared yet in the fight against Thanos – but I’m hoping these questions will be answered in the next Avengers movie. I mean, it’s only a month away – I can wait.

So yeah, I’d watch this movie again. And I’m excited to see what she gets up to in Avengers: Endgame next month.

Also, long live flerkens.

Thank you to the PR team for The Walt Disney Company MENA for the invite to the movie screening at the new Novo Cinemas at IMG Worlds of Adventure (it was a great cinema btw, and all the staff members there were so nice!).