Captain Marvel - The Marvel Carol Danvers one, not the DC Billy Batson one

17 posts were split to a new topic: “Race realism”? Uhhh… (warning: contents of this thread may be toxic)

It wasn’t very clear in the movie, but at the point when Chris Pine was pouring his heart out, WW was concussed by a bomb and couldn’t hear or think straight. Then at the climatic moment when Ares said men have no redeeming value, WW magically figured out what Chris Pine was saying. LOVE!!!111 Talk about contrived plot.

Ok so I got to go and see this last night at a preview. The acting is excellent, the cat steals the show in literally every scene he is in. The effects are much much better in the final movie than the trailers.

There is a very nice nod to Stan Lee.

Lots of spoliery stuff below.

But the pacing and tone seemed to me to be inconsistent between scenes. Im not sure the directing was up to the task. They tried to do too much and introduce too much in it.

It is quite slow and part of the reason for that is:

- lets introduce the kree

- lets introduce the skrulls

- lets introduce Kree Vers

- lets have Fury and Coloson

- lets now have a buddy movie

- lets now have Carol’s old friends

- lets now have ‘surprise’ the Kree be the bad guys

- lets now have Captain Marvel – who we have been waiting for all MOVIE.

So just as we finally get Carol in all her glory the movie ends. WTF!

How Carol gets her powers is consistent with the comics and Annette Benning actually being Mar-Vell was a complete but pleasant shock to me.

How they wrote around Carol not being present in the rest of the MCU and no one in space eg the guardians knowing about her was actually quite well done and dealt with why wasn’t she there in the first Avengers movie.

And now a complete rant.

Everyones favourite MCU macguffin is back. Blue and all cubey that’s right the tesseract.

Tesseract timeline (Thor / Captain America / Avengers / Infinity War / Captain Marvel).

- Early history. In Norway with villagers possibly as a result of the Asgardains leaving it there after battling frost giants.

- 1940’s - removed from Norway by Red Skull and used to make weapons

- 1944 / 1945 - ditched in the arctic during fight between Captain America and Red Skull

- late 1940’s - Howard Stark retrieves it and then… nothing

- 1990’s Professor Lawson nee Mar-Vell - discovers it in a joint USAF / NASA facility and removes it from earth for at least 6 years.

- 1990s returned to earth and regurgitated by Goose

- 2010’s Steve’s been asleep almost 70 years

- Used by Loki to start Avengers events

- Taken with Loki to Asgard

- Stolen by Loki ‘You really are the worst brother’

- Destroyed by Thanos and infinity gem retrieved.

Seriously are they suggesting it got ‘filed’ and no one looked for 50 - 60 years. This is arc of the covenant level stuff from Raiders. You would think the Shield might be a little more interested than that.

All in all pretty good, but to me not one of the best MCU movies.

A more focused sequel would be super cool. But sadly where’s goose been all this time since he’s been on earth.

Oh man, keep going and you guys are going to say that there’s no 100% objective way to review movies and it’s all dependent on taste / preferences, and that surely can’t be right…

Where would you rank it within the MCU movies?

I think I scraped the, uh, political discussion clear of the thread, but I mostly skimmed posts to avoid movie spoilers. If there’s anything I missed, feel free to flag the offending post and I’ll move it to its new P&R home.

-Tom

Ah, looks like the thread is back on track.

Watched this yesterday, and I quite enjoyed it. I don’t watch trailers if I can help it, or read about movies so I went in pretty blind.

In General: A solid origin story movie, and refreshingly non-cynical. Less of a Guardians of the Galaxy-retread than I expected.

The Good: The 90s setting worked well, good chemistry between the cast. The cat was great.

The Bad: Not much, a bit too many cuts of characters posing.

The Surprising: The digital de-aging seemed to work well. The first real action scene felt a lot like Mass Effect Multiplayer: The Movie.

I enjoyed this very much.

What cat?

Goose.

I was disappointed.

I had a good time because I loved the cast, loved the characters they played, and enjoyed all the new nerdy stuff it establishes about the Marvel world.

But the script was bad, the direction was perfunctory, and the score was limp (though the ‘90s hits were fun). Nothing that should’ve been exciting or emotional actually got through to me. Moments of triumph and humor both fell flat. And specifically, the structure of the movie was pretty rough and worked against all the stuff I liked:

Danvers not knowing who she was for most of the movie made it really hard to make us care about her until the movie was almost over.

Brie Larson did a great job, but she and Carol Danvers deserved a much better movie than this.

What cat? ;)

So anyway, should we go see this play this weekend Mrs. Lincoln?

Are you teasing me about saying I liked it except for how bad it was?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don’t think it adds up to a good movie, but it’s got stuff I like in it. I expect some will feel the same way, some people won’t like it at all, and some people won’t be bothered at all by what bothered me.

No…

Okay I’m an idiot. Even after I saw your response, for a few seconds I was confused. “No one else posted any negative reactions really, what’s he… oh, oh right

I’d already completely siloed off that drama in my mind. Carry on!

Even the marvel films that I’ve found to be on the Lowe end if the scale are worth watching for me. Some is surely the fanboy in me but I enjoy the look and feel of the MCU that I can have a good time with all of them. BP has pacing problems especially early on but the world was so vibrant and cool I didn’t care. Thor Dark World has Portman’s cardboard cutout as the heroine and an even less invested villain but being in that world kept me watching. And I found the final fight design cool. Dr Strange is as formulaic of the MCU as possible but it’s prob my favorite of the second tier hero films. What I’m saying is that even if Larson comes across as bored as I found her in the trailers (not saying she will, most complaints are I’ve seen are about script not acting) I’ll still love the hell out of this thing.

I thought Brie Larson was great. I especially loved Ben Mendelsohn. If anyone stole the show, I think it was him because it was so unexpected! That was a really cool character in a movie that had a lot of them. I wish Clark Gregg had gotten a little more to do, but they did just enough to flesh out Coulson that little bit more and I appreciate that.

Maybe I find it a lot easier to put myself in the shoes of a woman that’s been kicked and beaten down and told no for her whole life only to have to rise up when it was all on the line than @WhollySchmidt, but I certainly cared about Vers for the entire movie. I think it’s also a great homage to action films of the '80’s and '90’s. It’s Top Gun in a gender role reversal. Annette Benning even resembles Tom Skerritt! Taken in that context, I thought it was really well done.

I saw this last night and really enjoyed it. I’m also looking forward to enjoying hateful people getting upset that most normal people love it. My major structural complaint is about the (understandable?) choice to make some of the big set-pieces center around aircraft/spacecraft dogfights, which are just intrinsically less interesting than face-to-face stuff. But the acting was great. Brie Larson knocked it out of the park, and her chemistry with Samuel L. Jackson was epic.

The use of one specific very atypical plot beat was excellent.

Agreed completely on all of this.

I cared about “Vers” in the same way I hope anyone would if I explained what she’d been through. I just don’t think the movie succeeded at being a good movie—and by extension did the story of Vers no favors—because it executed weakly on all the storytelling advantages the medium should have. The cinematography, the staging, the composition of the action, the pacing and structure of the narrative, the score, all of those things that can make a movie a movie and not someone just relating a sequence of events, they all let me down.

It wasn’t an inability to empathize with the character, it was disappointment with the movie as a movie.

And with that said, you might be right: if the movie isn’t delivering on the emotional investment and payoff in the characters, what each viewer brings on their own will have an even bigger affect on their impression.