Captain Marvel
Mar. 15th, 2019 05:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessMy Captain Marvel review, then.
It was enjoyable!
Overall, it started slow, got better, was probably better at comedy than the action, Brie Larson was wonderful, and I am the perfect age for the nostalgia hit. So, if you’re rating it as a female superhero movie, not as good as Wonder Woman (a high bar) but nowhere near as bad as Electra and Catwoman. Phew! Yay! Etc. For MCU movies, I suppose everyone would rank them differently, but seeing Steve, Nat, Sam and Bruce in the mid-credits had more weight, as much because of the history as their perilous state. And I don’t think I desperately want or need to see this in the cinema a second time.
I really liked the reversals, that Annette Bening was Mar-Vell (I’d fallen for the spec that it was Jude Law), and that she was fighting for peace; to the fact that her lab was housing Skrull refugees. And that Ben Mendelsohn wasn’t playing the baddie (although having someone with an Aussie accent play a refugee came off as…interesting).
Can’t emphasise how great Larson was, her Carol was spunky, brave and walking around with amnesia, which was given about the right weight in a film with a strong comic tone. She conveyed a lot of emotional heft with her face. I think my favourite bits were her little whoops of joy as Carol came into her power/flew. Carol’s look as she got all light up was so cool (though I’m a little confused as to whether the source of her power was a Tessarect equivalent. Whatever, we’ve seen that Fury has passed on the toppest of Top Trumps to the Avengers for Endgame). I’m not so sure about what I think of the look of the suit when she needed to breathe with the Roman-ish/Marvin the Martian helmet. Apart from the heroics and the being the main character, it was fun to see a female speed freak.
And her femaleness and the fact that Maria and Monica were her connection to Earth, that Lawson was her mentor – and Bening had a ball playing her and the Supreme Intelligence – was utterly natural. More, please, Hollywood (though I don’t know what the box office is.)
That ‘female energy’, for want of a better phrase, was backed up by the soundtrack. Marvel learned the right lesson from GatG, and I never thought I’d see a blockbuster with Hole blaring over the closing credits. But that was the right call, because I found myself getting indignant about Nirvana playing when we hadn’t heard them!?!? As someone who remembers the 90s, hearing the cool ladies who had hits then (Elastica!!! From around the time Law broke through as an actor, heh), songs I mostly wouldn’t say were faves of mine, but found myself miming the words to and which worked great in this context, was such a smart choice.
I went in knowing very little about Carol’s comics backstory/stories, and I’d avoided spoilers. I’d thought there might be time travel, but this was basically set in the past. The de-aging CGI is much better than it used to be (koff X3), I just relaxed into watching younger Fury and Coulson, the latter new to SHIELD – and, of course, they played a big, reassuring part in introducing us to a new character. They had fun with the tension of whether this was when Fury lost his eye.
And it was fun to watch Carol and Fury have a road movie (by way of planes). Larson and Jackson bounced off each other well. (I thought Fury was as taken by Maria as he was by Carol. Possibly more could have been done with his real reaction to learning about Earth’s position in a galactic war, instead of just playing it cool.)
The Vers/Commander stuff fizzed out for me, for all that I thought that training with a mentor would be laden with UST and I would ship it from the trailer! Though I think there was a little crush on her side, and it seemed like he had a soft spot for her, I was quickly dissuaded of my preconceptions. I daresay there will be meta about how he and the Kree tried to control Carol. The way that relationship and how we saw the Commander developed well – for example the difference in his interactions with Ronan - making the moment where she ignored his attempt to talk her into not using her power get a thumbs-up for me.
It might be my eyesight, but the first mission and much of the stuff in spaceships was too poorly lit for me. I’m also not fussed about dogfights, personally. And I really didn’t think that the opening grabbed: Vers’s team really didn’t make an impact, Gemma Chan was unrecognisable. The film got a lot better once we got to Earth.
Will Captain Marvel 2 explore more of Carol’s beef and unfinished business with the Kree, and when will it be set?
Not-a-cat Goose was both fun, but also made me think of the cat in Men in Black, and Hermione’s Crookshanks. The feline versus G-force and no gravity was a bit cat meme. But the muzzle really got to me.
I felt that the directors were better at the human interactions than the action stuff, but watching Carol soar was satisfying, obviously – that the representative of humanity at its best was female. And the film knew that she’s an important role model, the girl who picked herself up becoming the woman, in the role it gave Monica. I expect Lieutenant Trouble to return.
The mid-credits sequence, where Carol met the Avengers (and how Steve and Nat give All The Orders) was much better than waiting to see a not!cat throw up the Tessarect. (It’s bad, but I’ve forgotten the history of the Tessarect.)
Now that she’s proved she can lead a blockbuster (I thought she deserved a slightly better movie), all the good directors should be fighting over Larson.
I had thoughts about blood – if she had Kree blood transfusion, no wonder she won’t have aged between this film and our time – but some of it depends on what species she thought she was at the outset.
And giving the Marvel studios logo over to Stan Lee was a nice touch, and most of the audience went ‘aww’ at his cameo. I laughed loudly at the 90s stuff – Blockbusters! The ‘speed’ of computers.
It was enjoyable!
Overall, it started slow, got better, was probably better at comedy than the action, Brie Larson was wonderful, and I am the perfect age for the nostalgia hit. So, if you’re rating it as a female superhero movie, not as good as Wonder Woman (a high bar) but nowhere near as bad as Electra and Catwoman. Phew! Yay! Etc. For MCU movies, I suppose everyone would rank them differently, but seeing Steve, Nat, Sam and Bruce in the mid-credits had more weight, as much because of the history as their perilous state. And I don’t think I desperately want or need to see this in the cinema a second time.
I really liked the reversals, that Annette Bening was Mar-Vell (I’d fallen for the spec that it was Jude Law), and that she was fighting for peace; to the fact that her lab was housing Skrull refugees. And that Ben Mendelsohn wasn’t playing the baddie (although having someone with an Aussie accent play a refugee came off as…interesting).
Can’t emphasise how great Larson was, her Carol was spunky, brave and walking around with amnesia, which was given about the right weight in a film with a strong comic tone. She conveyed a lot of emotional heft with her face. I think my favourite bits were her little whoops of joy as Carol came into her power/flew. Carol’s look as she got all light up was so cool (though I’m a little confused as to whether the source of her power was a Tessarect equivalent. Whatever, we’ve seen that Fury has passed on the toppest of Top Trumps to the Avengers for Endgame). I’m not so sure about what I think of the look of the suit when she needed to breathe with the Roman-ish/Marvin the Martian helmet. Apart from the heroics and the being the main character, it was fun to see a female speed freak.
And her femaleness and the fact that Maria and Monica were her connection to Earth, that Lawson was her mentor – and Bening had a ball playing her and the Supreme Intelligence – was utterly natural. More, please, Hollywood (though I don’t know what the box office is.)
That ‘female energy’, for want of a better phrase, was backed up by the soundtrack. Marvel learned the right lesson from GatG, and I never thought I’d see a blockbuster with Hole blaring over the closing credits. But that was the right call, because I found myself getting indignant about Nirvana playing when we hadn’t heard them!?!? As someone who remembers the 90s, hearing the cool ladies who had hits then (Elastica!!! From around the time Law broke through as an actor, heh), songs I mostly wouldn’t say were faves of mine, but found myself miming the words to and which worked great in this context, was such a smart choice.
I went in knowing very little about Carol’s comics backstory/stories, and I’d avoided spoilers. I’d thought there might be time travel, but this was basically set in the past. The de-aging CGI is much better than it used to be (koff X3), I just relaxed into watching younger Fury and Coulson, the latter new to SHIELD – and, of course, they played a big, reassuring part in introducing us to a new character. They had fun with the tension of whether this was when Fury lost his eye.
And it was fun to watch Carol and Fury have a road movie (by way of planes). Larson and Jackson bounced off each other well. (I thought Fury was as taken by Maria as he was by Carol. Possibly more could have been done with his real reaction to learning about Earth’s position in a galactic war, instead of just playing it cool.)
The Vers/Commander stuff fizzed out for me, for all that I thought that training with a mentor would be laden with UST and I would ship it from the trailer! Though I think there was a little crush on her side, and it seemed like he had a soft spot for her, I was quickly dissuaded of my preconceptions. I daresay there will be meta about how he and the Kree tried to control Carol. The way that relationship and how we saw the Commander developed well – for example the difference in his interactions with Ronan - making the moment where she ignored his attempt to talk her into not using her power get a thumbs-up for me.
It might be my eyesight, but the first mission and much of the stuff in spaceships was too poorly lit for me. I’m also not fussed about dogfights, personally. And I really didn’t think that the opening grabbed: Vers’s team really didn’t make an impact, Gemma Chan was unrecognisable. The film got a lot better once we got to Earth.
Will Captain Marvel 2 explore more of Carol’s beef and unfinished business with the Kree, and when will it be set?
Not-a-cat Goose was both fun, but also made me think of the cat in Men in Black, and Hermione’s Crookshanks. The feline versus G-force and no gravity was a bit cat meme. But the muzzle really got to me.
I felt that the directors were better at the human interactions than the action stuff, but watching Carol soar was satisfying, obviously – that the representative of humanity at its best was female. And the film knew that she’s an important role model, the girl who picked herself up becoming the woman, in the role it gave Monica. I expect Lieutenant Trouble to return.
The mid-credits sequence, where Carol met the Avengers (and how Steve and Nat give All The Orders) was much better than waiting to see a not!cat throw up the Tessarect. (It’s bad, but I’ve forgotten the history of the Tessarect.)
Now that she’s proved she can lead a blockbuster (I thought she deserved a slightly better movie), all the good directors should be fighting over Larson.
I had thoughts about blood – if she had Kree blood transfusion, no wonder she won’t have aged between this film and our time – but some of it depends on what species she thought she was at the outset.
And giving the Marvel studios logo over to Stan Lee was a nice touch, and most of the audience went ‘aww’ at his cameo. I laughed loudly at the 90s stuff – Blockbusters! The ‘speed’ of computers.
