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My final Captain Marvel review
Apr. 16th, 2019 12:18 pmCaptain Marvel is missing something: a heart. Comparing this origin story to Captain America: The First Avenger makes it glaringly obvious that the people who wrote and directed this movie didn't understand what makes an audience care about a hero. Rather than show us what makes Carol Danvers special and engaging our emotions, the movie simply tells us - over and over - how great she is.
That doesn't work It turns the movie into nothing more than a huge advertisement for a lead character that we have no reason to care about in the first place. A quick montage of her repeatedly "getting up" after falling down is an inadequate replacement for the comparatively extensive scenes of a puny Steve Rogers standing up to bullies and stubbornly doing the right thing - no matter the cost - in Captain America.
There was also a moment in Captain Marvel which demonstrated that the writers and directors neither understood nor respected the genre. A key element of the movie is the struggle between the Skrulls and the Kree to acquire a device that is presented as a sort of ultimate weapon: the Lightspeed engine. Apparently nobody realized that an engine that can travel at the speed of light would still take years to reach even the nearest star. Given that effectively instantaneous interstellar travel via boom tube is demonstrated in the movie long before the Lightspeed engine is even introduced, that whole aspect of the plot makes no sense.
That flaw could have been easily fixed by simply calling it a "hyperspeed" engine, or some other jargon which implied enormous speed. But nobody cared enough, or understood basic physics and the plot of the movie enough, to notice that the name of a critical element in the movie made no sense. That obvious error slipped by every single person involved in the making of this hundred-million-plus movie. That's how disconnected from the fans the writers, directors, and Disney/Marvel themselves have become.
As for the rest of the movie, it was pretty much paint-by-the-numbers. Phoned in. Uninspired. Perhaps Brie Larson could have improved it a bit with overwhelming charisma, but she either couldn't or wasn't allowed to. She's a "hero" who has little personality other than the occasional smirk. Who becomes the most powerful being in the universe by accident, and doesn't seem to be touched by that. Who has no weaknesses or flaws. She's just perfect, and she knows it. How are we supposed to identify with THAT?
That's a boring hero. And if she's the new leader of the MCU, and isn't enormously improved in her next appearance (as Thor was improved in Thor: Ragnarok), the outlook is poor for the quality of the MCU going forward - no matter how much Disney artifically inflates the numbers.
That doesn't work It turns the movie into nothing more than a huge advertisement for a lead character that we have no reason to care about in the first place. A quick montage of her repeatedly "getting up" after falling down is an inadequate replacement for the comparatively extensive scenes of a puny Steve Rogers standing up to bullies and stubbornly doing the right thing - no matter the cost - in Captain America.
There was also a moment in Captain Marvel which demonstrated that the writers and directors neither understood nor respected the genre. A key element of the movie is the struggle between the Skrulls and the Kree to acquire a device that is presented as a sort of ultimate weapon: the Lightspeed engine. Apparently nobody realized that an engine that can travel at the speed of light would still take years to reach even the nearest star. Given that effectively instantaneous interstellar travel via boom tube is demonstrated in the movie long before the Lightspeed engine is even introduced, that whole aspect of the plot makes no sense.
That flaw could have been easily fixed by simply calling it a "hyperspeed" engine, or some other jargon which implied enormous speed. But nobody cared enough, or understood basic physics and the plot of the movie enough, to notice that the name of a critical element in the movie made no sense. That obvious error slipped by every single person involved in the making of this hundred-million-plus movie. That's how disconnected from the fans the writers, directors, and Disney/Marvel themselves have become.
As for the rest of the movie, it was pretty much paint-by-the-numbers. Phoned in. Uninspired. Perhaps Brie Larson could have improved it a bit with overwhelming charisma, but she either couldn't or wasn't allowed to. She's a "hero" who has little personality other than the occasional smirk. Who becomes the most powerful being in the universe by accident, and doesn't seem to be touched by that. Who has no weaknesses or flaws. She's just perfect, and she knows it. How are we supposed to identify with THAT?
That's a boring hero. And if she's the new leader of the MCU, and isn't enormously improved in her next appearance (as Thor was improved in Thor: Ragnarok), the outlook is poor for the quality of the MCU going forward - no matter how much Disney artifically inflates the numbers.
