Here’s the thing about Captain Marvel, with expectations incredibly high. Its place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is troublesome, not because it is a bad movie or the character isn’t compelling, but it needed to set the stage for the character’s appearance in Avengers: Endgame which came out in theaters just a couple of months later. It also carried the weight of being the first Marvel movie centered on a female hero.
If Captain Marvel (the movie) had literally been about a guy, keeping just about everything exactly the same except switching the lead hero’s gender, I wonder what the reception would have been. Ginger Rogers was a much better dancer than Fred Astaire not because she did everything he did, but she did it backwards and in heels. While Captain Marvel didn’t do her heroics backwards and in heels, she did prove herself just as able, if not more so, than her male counterparts.
By now it’s no secret that the person’s real name is Carol Danvers, but when we first meet with her, she is Vers, a soldier in a Kree unit fighting the Skrull menace across the galaxy. Her commander is Yon-Rogg (Jude Law) and he not only trained her but the have a little bit of that “will they or won’t they” vibe going – and thankfully it is clear they won’t.
Things happen, Vers crashes on Earth, winds up confronting her past, and in the end saving the planet.
I think what I liked about Captain Marvel as a movie was how it showed a strong woman, who was in the right, getting talked down to and she simply kept persevering.
While Captain Marvel, the film, isn’t as fun as Ant-Man & The Wasp or Thor: Ragnarok, it is highly enjoyable, has solid action and a decent plot. In short, Captain Marvel is a solid Marvel super hero movie, and whether you will enjoy it or not is probably highly dependent on that fact. Are there problems? Absolutely. virtually every super hero film has a number of problems, but fortunately Captain Marvel has so few and they are rather minimal that you almost have to want to hate the movie without having seen it in order to not enjoy it.
As a Blu-ray Captain Marvel is decent, but we are used to getting short changed on these sorts of things. The audio commentary with co-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck is solid, but it is probably the best of all the special features. The various featurettes add up to less than half and hour, a few deleted scenes and a few outtakes. I would have liked a featurette about the music and its selection, or maybe an in-depth conversation with stars Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson. Perhaps any of the various Comic-Con panels about the movie. See, there is just so much lacking – it’s a problem with many Blu-ray releases these days.
Still, I think Captain Marvel is a great movie and worth owning.