MAYvel Phase 3; Captain Marvel: "Oh boy, another movie no one can agree on and one where every opinion is hated!"

Because those are always fun to cover, and in no way at all nerve-racking, even if I cover media after they're done in the spotlight.

I was not looking forward to MAYvel Phase 3 this year purely because of this movie. Not because I hated it, I was honestly pretty impartial to it when I first saw it, but because it was another one of those movies that no one could agree on, where there was no middle ground in the discussion around the movie, you either loved everything about it or you hated it with everything you had because you're sexist. Yes, this movie is in the same camp as Ghostbusters 2016, in that it was held up as one of the greatest movies ever made because of female representation in the media and discussion surrounding the movie, and it was hard to discuss the positives and negatives of the movie without coming off as an apologist, or a sexist. Without going into details on the movie itself, I do think that kind of talk does a disservice to movies and media as a whole, as it not only brings to light the biases many people have about what they want in a movie, rather than the quality of a movie, and it also drags down positive representation of characters as people assume that it's bait for specific demographics, instead of being an interesting character and story to tell. That, combined with the increased pressure by automatic comparisons between this movie, the previous year's Black Panther and 2017's Wonder Woman, the release on International Woman's Day, and it felt like very little talk around Captain Marvel was actually about Captain Marvel. So, a year later, was it all worth it?

Starting with the story, and to get it out of the way, while I think the characters and their interactions are fine, and a lot of fun at times, this story is pretty mediocre, but I don't think there was any chance of it being better than mediocre. A part of it is the fact that this started filming after Bree Larson, the actress who plays Captain Marvel, finished working on her parts for Avengers Infinity War (which I believe became the post-credits scene for this movie) and Avengers Endgame, meaning that the team working on Captain Marvel were stuck with making an origin story that didn't really get to go anywhere character-wise. But that being said, there is another part of that, but I'll get into that later. The story itself revolves around Carol Danvers, a test pilot in the US Air Force who couldn't go on combat missions due to, as far as the movie is concerned, prejudice. On a test flight for a secret Kree scientist called Mar-Vel, their ship is attacked and as a result of the attack, she is given powers from the test engine that is powered by something relating to the Tesseract, but the force knocks her unconscious and gives her amnesia. She's taken back to the Kree homeworld of Hala, and over six years becomes the Kree warrior Vers. If you guessed that the rest of this movie is focusing on her getting her memories back, and realising that the Kree (remember that guy from Guardians of the Galaxy 1 that wanted to wipe out an entire planet with the Power stone? His species are Kree) are evil, you'd be right! All you're missing are updating the Skrall to be war refugees while the Kree make them out to be terrorists in a mix of the Red Scare and modern-day terrorism, along with the setting of the movie being... 1995 America... huh... so that's what the US looked like when I was born...

Credit where it's due, the CGI in this movie is great, especially with the de-aging of Samuel Jackson

The soundtrack for me is mixed, while most of it is ok and fitting, there is one song that I don't think works, and that is the position of Just a Girl and... yeah let's address that elephant in the room. This movie leans heavily into "girl power!", and I can't help but think that it's one of the other big anchors holding the movie back. The main reason for it is how blatant it is, with most of the interactions Carol has with a male character, especially in the memory fragments we see of her, drowning in sexist undertones that can be summed up as "you get knocked down, you get back up". While that in itself isn't a bad thing, seeing it over, and over, and over again in the movie feels patronizing, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were some girls and women who did find it kind of insulting to be reminded of it constantly throughout the movie. I think a part of it is because we know Carol can, and will do that, we see it throughout the movie even without the flashbacks, so the scene when we see her as a child, a teenager, and a new recruit into the airforce getting back up after she's fallen down or made a mistake comes off as trailer bait rather than a big moment for the movie. If it was one or two of those moments, for example, the child and the new recruit, and the child one shows her at a point of weakness before someone like her mother teaches her how to get back up, I can't help but think that would have been stronger, because as is, it kind of suffers from the same issue as Ghostbusters 2016 did where it feels like it's pushing girl power by making the guys look awful. At least it's better than the Disney channel Tweenager shows where the brothers are always disgusting and the dad's always embarrassing? To go back to the song, aside from adding to the sledgehammer that is all of that, it tries to do a Guardians of the Galaxy with its placement in a fight scene, but it's the only time it does that, which makes it stand out like a sore thumb.

One issue I heard a lot of people bring up when regarding the movie was Brie Larson's performance, and though I can see where they're coming from, it's not as bad as people make it out to be, nothing that better direction and not being hindered by the next movie to be released because she had already filmed it couldn't fix. The performances in the movie are overall fine, with many of the interactions being a lot of fun, especially from Talos and Fury. It's the character interactions that are the reason why I can't really call the movie bad. Weaker among the MCU movies, yeah, even ignoring the bludgeoning of the sledgehammer that is it's themes at times, but I can't call it the worst of the MCU. The most that I can say against it is that the list of MCU movies that I made last year, and how I thought they ranked, I put Captain Marvel at the middle of the list, and in hindsight, it was high for where it was but not by much. I think Captain Marvel as a character has potential, but 2019 wasn't a good first impression for her. Is the movie bad? No, just predictable to a fault. Was it worth the war people fought over it? No.