I don’t have much immediately to add from the other thread but now we don’t need spoiler tags. Spoil away!
I didn’t like the end. She was ridiculously overpowered once she blew off the inhibitor and I never felt a bit of tension beyond that point.
Copied over from the other Thread:
So far, no one’s mentioned the Marvel Studios logo title card opening. Beautiful. First tear shed for me for this film, less that two seconds into the film.
And my favorite line:
As Fury gets his eye scratched by Goose:
Further thoughts on Fury:
13 years after the events of this film, he is the Director of SHIELD. I feel like he should have been higher up than he seemed to be here. He seems like an experienced yet still low level agent. He doesn’t seem like someone who is on track to be Director of the organization a mere 13 years later.
Dr. Wendy Lawson either stole the Tesseract from SHIELD or she was working with SHEILD (in cooperation with the USAF and NASA as noted at the Pegasus facility). That she was working with SHIELD makes more sense. Given that the Tesseract then went missing after her death, then I’d think her name should be known throughout the organization since any lead on Wendy Lawson would be a lead on the lost Tesseract.
So, in addition to being higher up, I would have wanted Fury to know who she was (after all, he did know what Pegasus was) even if he didn’t know the specifics of what she was working on (he was 6 years lower in rank and experience at the time) and for the purposes of the plot of this movie it would have been acceptable for him to not know who the other pilot was, but I still think he should have recognized her name.
On Brie Larson…
She was awesome!
I think she beautifully conveyed the constant of personality and who a person is at their core despite memory loss. She wasn’t a blank slate having lost her memory, and she wasn’t a personality fashioned by her Kree Starforce superiors trying to overwrite her memory loss. She was every bit Carol Danvers throughout the film- just with memory loss. Not an easy feat to make that believable. She did so much with just the most minor of facial expressions. For me, her performance filled every gap left by the script.
Oh, and Stan Lee
Practicing his lines from the Mallrats script!!!
I enjoyed the movie, I liked it better than the Oscar-nominated Black Panther. The reveal of the Skrulls not really being villains was a major twist from the comics, so I enjoyed not seeing that coming. I liked how they changed the Mar-Vell character. The structure of the movie worked for me very much. I liked Monica Rambeau being introduced as having a connection with the rest of the Captain Marvel legacy.
I wasn’t crazy about how it was used as an “explain everything” movie. There really wasn’t a need to explain Nick Fury’s missing eye on-screen, an injury to a guy whose job involves putting himself in danger pretty much explains itself. We didn’t need the name “Avengers” to have a specific inspiration, it makes enough sense on its own. The movie “Finding Dory” rubbed me wrong in a similar way.
The use of the tesseract here is somewhat puzzling. I thought the tesseract was retrieved from the Red Skull’s ship at the same time as frozen Captain America was. I’d need to re-watch Captain America: the First Avenger, Avengers and/or Thor to hear if that was ever stated explicitly, and I’m not in the mood to, so I’ll assume it doesn’t violate known MCU continuity. But I’d have expected Cap to be discovered sooner if someone had found the Red Skull’s ship and retrieved the tesseract from it.
I’m also not sure why Carol felt she could trust that the Skrulls weren’t deceiving her (and, previously, Mar-Vell/Lawson, whose word she was trusting about the Skrulls being unjustly persecuted). Heck, Mar-Vell/Lawson could have ultimately been a Skrull herself rather than a Kree turncoat. (Unless the blue blood gave it away…did we see what color the Skrulls bleed? Still, she could have been a Kree who was taken in by their sob story, no proof that they really were victims rather than infiltrating aggressors.)
It was not bad but the Marvel formula is getting kind of stale. It’s not bad but it just feels like you’ve seen the movie already.
I felt the beginning took a while to get off the ground. It was simultaneously slow and confusing. But it gets better as it went along. I liked the twist with the Skrulls.
I was positive while in the theater that the time line with the tesseract was messed up by this movie but after some googling I guess I just misremembered some things.
The tesseract wasn’t in Red Skull’s ship - it fell out of the plane when it disintegrated Red Skull, presumably a couple hundred miles before Cap crashed. At the end of the movie, we see Howard Stark finding the tesseract on the ocean floor. He’s not any older than he was in the rest of the movie, so this was relatively soon after the crash.
Also, it’s Stark who found the tesseract - so it wasn’t necessarily in SHIELD’s hands between First Avenger and Captain Marvel, although I might be forgetting something that contradicts this.
The Tesseract fell from Red Skull’s ship while they were still in the air (as Red Skull tried to catch it then got himself blasted into space). The Tesseract fell from the plane into the ocean before Steve crashed the plane.
Howard Stark found the Tesseract in the ocean during one of the earliest unsuccessful searches for Steve Rogers’ crash site. SHIELD has had the Tesseract since it was founded as an offshoot of the SSR of the 1940s.
Steve’s frozen body was found just about a year before the events of the first Avengers film. In that film, Fury tells Steve “Howard Stark fished it (the Tesseract) out of the ocean when he was trying to find you.”
They were actually searching for Cap, and the trail they were following ended at the tesseract - presumably Stark built a tesseract energy detector when he had access to the tesseract powered Hydra weapons. So it’s probably weeks or at most months after Cap crashed.
Even if SHIELD did have the tesseract it between 1945 & 1995, remember that SHIELD had been completely subverted by Hydra almost since their founding, so it’s not impossible they’d already squirreled it away and shopped it around to people who thought they could figure out how to use it.
Liked it a lot. Not quite top tier for the MCU, IMO, but close. Compared to the other solo-hero first movies, I think it’s almost as good as BP and IM, as good as CA:TFA, and better than AM, DS, Thor, and TIH.
Which, if I read the set-up correctly, makes a fairly even fight with Ronan the Accuser if they do a second film. Plus it kept this film’s bad guys credible until the very end.
So, who’s going to watch all the older movies and try to spot the cat?
Anyway, I thought this was a by-the-numbers origin movie, basically a combination of Wonder Woman and Justice League. We were all just waiting for the real Captain Marvel to turn up. I would have liked to see her battle an Apocalypse-level villain. Much of the hype was around the hero being a woman, but you could have had a man there and it would have made no difference. But it was a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.
I doubt the sequel will focus on Ronan… we already know what happens to him (he goes on his own and then, briefly, allies with Thanos). Further, it seems clear to me that without the Power Stone, Captain Marvel is way, way above his league. Before he got the Power Stone, he just seemed to be tough enough to beat up Drax. That’s not exactly the peak of MCU power levels.
SHIELD, like every other intelligence agency, will be super-compartmentalized. The only people who might even suspect Wendy Lawson (and/or Carol Danvers) weren’t killed in that crash would be those directly working on the project. Others might simply know that there is a Project Pegasus, but no details. I think Fury was the latter. And while I could certainly see a scene showing it ending up on the cutting room floor, most likely Fury got up to speed on Pegasus after connecting it to the Skrull in his car (and his boss had reason to want Fury following up on the details).
Ronan snapped the Chitauri’s neck with a gesture, and he didn’t just beat up Drax, he humiliated Drax without even trying. In the comics, Ronan the Accuser is a player in the same league. But it does bring in the problem that prequels have to be careful not to alter established MCU canon too much, or it breaks the illusion. So maybe not.
Miller et al:
See, that’s why I needed to re-watch it. I forget details like that, I suppose.
Since Carol is powered by an Infinity Stone, it would make sense that she would be a key in a fight against Thanos.
Ronan’s dead. I doubt they’ll do a second flashback movie.
Although it is certainly possible for gaslighting to be done to a man, it’s a theme that women often apply to their own experiences. Anyone who’s read more than a handful of #MeToo era magazine articles and essays has seen the term a lot over the past couple years. As such, I think women in the audience take a lot more away from the gaslighting done to Carol by the Kree Starforce, planting seeds of doubt about herself/setting the terms by which she must prove herself.
And, sure, the “keep your emotions in check” thing has always been a trope of the warrior training tradition but I think it’s got extra meaning in this film.
The narrative doesn’t do somersaults to imply that all of her experiences are “women’s experiences”, there’s plenty that any man could relate to, but I do think there is plenty in the film that reflects a woman’s point of view and particular struggles that women bond over.
I’m sorry but I don’t follow you. What’s gaslighting got to do with it? The warrior who doesn’t know / has been robbed of their past is a cliche with plenty of precedent - Jason Bourne, anyone?
I hope not (2nd flashback movie). I could see them somehow, someway writing Ronan back in when they fix The Snap™ but only if Lee Pace wants to spend more than the day or two that it took for his CM scenes playing the roll again.
I’m not bienville, but,
I think there’s a particular spin on it here that you don’t find in the Bourne movies, for example. The Kree were playing heavily on Carol Danver’s supposed weakness. Their line was that she was nothing without them, that it was only with their help that she was able to be strong, etc. At the climax of the movie her revelation is that she, as her friend had told her earlier, had been strong from the start. That her strength was evident not in how many times she failed, but in how consistently she pulled herself back up and tried again.
This was described as a uniquely human strength, and it’s a common enough them in Marvel movies and elsewhere to say that there’s something just gosh darn special about those humans. But I don’t think that it’s a stretch to say that this movie presented the conflict from a uniquely feminine perspective. This is epitomized in the non-fight at the end, where Danvers flatly states that she has nothing to prove to Yon-Rogg. He, the male, doesn’t get to set the rules for her; she knows who and what she is.
Would the movie have worked with a male protagonist? I’d say that it could be made to work. But I think it would be a different movie thematically.