Stuck in the Middle

Rating: 7/10 (9 March 2019)

My thoughts on Captain Marvel...I actually kind of liked it. For starters, actors...For one, acting. Brie Larson IMO actually did pretty well as Captain Marvel. My initial concerns were on whether she'd be a Mary Sue character of sorts since she was heavily marketed as being THE most powerful superhero in the MCU. I also thought that from the looks of the trailers, she would be less emotive. I was wrong on that. While she is powerful, she is by no means a Mary Sue. Her having amnesia and then going mixing for six years serves its purpose of that hurting other characters who were affected by her loss such as with her best friend from the Air Force Maria Rambeau, played by Lashana Lynch. Captain Marvel has emotions: she can be funny and snarky. She has moments where she felt conflicted about what she was doing, especially when she realizes that she couldn't trust anyone, not even those she was assigned to work with. I also liked her bonding with Nick Fury, and I don't even need to say that Samuel L. Jackson doesn't once again make the character his own.
Maria was a character I liked. Her flashbacks with Captain Marvel are touching as well as heartbreaking. Lynch does a great job to give raw emotion to her character that I legitimately felt sorry for her. The rest of Captain Marvel's team range from interesting to bland. Yon-Rogg was okay..though I felt that his actor was just hamming it up with his performance at times. What he is actually like in the film is admittedly not too surprising of a twist. I pretty much saw it coming the first time he popped up. Lee Pace returns to reprise his role as Ronan the Accuser who here is calm and collected and isn't the insane zealot he will devolve into in Guardians of the Galaxy. I felt Ronan was kind of wasted here as he doesn't take much of an active role in the film as I thought he was going to. The Supreme Intelligence (Annette Bening) for the most part is intimidating, but I didn't get a good deal of what her character will be. Talos, the leader of the Skrulls, was actually pretty decent. He starts off as being an antagonist but then becomes an ally. He's probably one of the more funny characters in the film.
Action scenes were fine. I liked how they depicted the process it had to take for a Skrull to change into another form with their skin ripping as they morph. Otherwise, I guess my issue with the film is that it largely feels like a Phase One movie. The plot of the movie was pretty predictable to a degree, and is kind of a standard superhero flick. Really, I feel that there is some wasted potential that the film suffered from as it tried to like back up with the end of Infinity War. I wanted to know more about The Skrull and Kree War, or maybe some further explanation to their world. The bad guys aren't necessarily bad, but they feel like a call back to the ones from the first and second phases where they lack some flair to them. I guess I can't really say I'm disappointed with what I saw because I wasn't largely familiar with the character. But to have this film get wedged between a two-parter, it could've done more to make itself stand out more rather than just being filler.