The latest addition to Marvel’s ever-expanding universe is a female-fronted superhero film that delivers on all the promise of its premise. It borrows from both Carol Danvers’ 51-year-old comic book history and the 2012 revamp (by Kelly Sue DeConnick and artists like Jamie McKeller) that turned her into a courageous space adventurer and new leader of the Avengers.
Director Anna Boden and co-writer Ryan Fleck, whose quiet, sensitive indie films include Half Nelson and 2015’s grotty gambling drama Mississippi Grind, are not obvious choices for a blockbuster as loud as this. But they’re able to balance all the nerdy details with a genuine sense of fun and an irresistibly charismatic leading lady.
Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel spends the first part of her film regaining memories and learning how to use her powers, which are more than just photon-based bullets and sparkly fists. It’s a ponderous and occasionally slow-moving set up, which makes it easy to forget how exciting her action sequences are.
Things start to pick up when the Skrulls arrive (led by Ben Mendelsohn) and hunt down a crucial piece of tech invented by Dr Wendy Lawson. Her mission takes her crashing to Earth, right into 1995 and through the roof of a Blockbuster video store, an era-appropriate setting that offers cheap nostalgia laughs. There she meets S.H.I.E.L.’s Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, convincingly digitally de-aged).
They team up with old BFF Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch, nimbly avoiding token-black-friend cliches) to fight off Zawe Ashton’s villainous commander Dar-Benn, and the film’s funky 1990s atmosphere and bouncy soundtrack adds some freshness to its otherwise familiar origin story formula. But despite a solid supporting cast and an exciting climax, the film feels less fully realised than most other MCU movies.
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