Another win for Marvel

Rating: 7/10 (9 March 2019)

After 11 years and 21 movies, we finally have our first female-led Marvel hero film, and while it's not up there with Guardians of the Galaxy or The Winter Solder as the best of the bunch, Captain Marvel is still a lot of fun to watch and works well as a stand-alone feature. There's some issues I had which I'll get into in a bit, but I also can't deny just how entertaining of an experience it was.
Despite a few stiff line readings here and there, Brie Larson is wonderful as Carol Danvers AKA Captain Marvel herself as she infuses the character with power, heart, and a bit of mystery as she tries to uncover what happened in her past that she can no longer remember. Her chemistry with Samuel L. Jackson is off-the-charts good as the two of them create a classic buddy-cop dynamic, Ben Mendelsohn gets some of the best comedic moments as an alien warrior who comes to Earth looking for this film's MacGuffin, and Goose the cat rightly earns his place among the great cinematic felines in ways that I wouldn't dare spoil.
This is basically a standard origin story on paper, but by framing it in a way where we're as lost as Danvers as she tries to figure out who she really is, it makes the story feel a bit fresher than most other first installments in a superhero franchise. Setting the story in 1995 creates the potential for plenty of jokes involving everything from Radio Shack to dial-up Internet that work more often than not, the visual effects are truly spectacular especially the de-aging effects for Jackson who convincingly looks 25 years younger, I loved the musical score which has the feel of a sci-fi space epic from the 90's, and the film's two moments devoted to Stan Lee are PERFECT.
As for issues, I don't think directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have the best eye for action sequences when it comes to how to shoot them. They do a good job finding the human side of this superhuman especially in the second half of the film where she encounters an old friend, but while some of the action was exciting, other moments such as a fight scene near the end were over-edited or simply couldn't tell what was happening onscreen.