Captain Mediocre? Captain Monotone? Captain Marvel-At-This-Awful-Writing?

Rating: 2/10 (9 April 2019)

Trick question! It's all of the above. I thought Twilight had the monopoly on actresses who choose not to act. I was so wrong.
Fight scenes: mediocre. The early fight between her and a bunch of skrulls while her hands were bound was cool, but immediately subverted by the fact that she deus ex machina'd her way out of her bonds with no meaningful struggle whatsoever. Everything else was just the same fight over and over - Carol fights, miraculously gets stronger (or is obviously stronger than her enemy to begin with), and defeats her opponent without so much as breaking a sweat. Or a smile. Or any expression at all, really.
VFX: poor. Expected a hell of a lot better from a marvel movie that the studio has put so much effort into promoting as the new face of the franchise. The skrulls transforming made people in my theatre laugh. Carol's fight at the end was so CGI, it made the CGI in The Last Jedi look good by comparison. A mess, really.
Writing: a garbage fire, I wish I was being harsh. I cannot express with more vehemence how disappointed I am in the writing of both the script and, most importantly, Carol Danvers herself. There is not a character in the MCU right now with a flatter arc than Carol. Even pre-ragnarok Thor had more emotional depth to him. For Carol to be so lacking in substance is unforgivable. I'm a young woman. I AM the audience Captain Marvel was allegedly written for. So why, then, can I relate to Nicholas Joseph Fury more in this movie than I can the PROTAGONIST? Its such god awful writing I was and still am astounded by the positive reviews it gets concerning its characterization. No, the Kree instructing her to show less emotion ISN'T an excuse when she is blatantly unaffected by the training from the very beginning of the movie. Literally her first on-screen appearance is to defy her mentor's wishes for her to be more emotionally inert. She clearly isn't buying what they're selling, so that rationalization for lack of emotion is absolute BS. Nothing connects. Nothing links up. It's a script in shambles. Carol has done nothing particularly impressive by the end (and no, having amazing powers does not count when she does not have the emotional journey to make those powers a fulfilling end to her story re: Thor, Steve, Wanda), certainly doesn't deserve to be called the "original Avenger" considering how little she actually had to do with Fury himself (calling them the Goose Initiative would have made more sense in the context of the film), and isn't overall going to be a great addition to Endgame if this move is anything to judge by. She has faced none of the emotional toil that the other Avengers have. She's less experienced in this regard than even Spider-man. If she is written in Endgame as wise-cracking and unaffected as she is in her own movie, she's liable to actually ruin conclusion of the MCU's greatest characters considering how disproportionately powerful the writers have made her here. Luckily I have some faith in the Russo brothers, so here's hoping they salvage something from her terrible debut movie to put in Endgame. Something with a tad more heart than Captain Marvel is currently shown to have.
Acting: look, I really don't know what kind of script Brie Larson was dealt. It seems to have been horrendously awful in her defense. Nonetheless, Samuel L Jackson, Ben Mendelson, and Lashana Lynch all managed to breathe some life into their roles. Larson is the MCU's Kristen Stewart at present. I did not see a single meaningful expression on her face the entire movie. Not genuine excitement, happiness, frustration, sadness, nothing. She was so wooden it was painful. I felt nothing for her because she felt nothing. And I really can't tell if it's because the script wrote her as such or because Brie Larson flubbed it. I really can't. Perhaps it's some unholy combination of the two. Either way, yikes.
tl;dr what else there is to say. This movie was god-awful. I liked Goose. And yet even then, goose being the one who cost fury his eye is... about as underwhelming as the rest of the film, I'd say. People saw this movie because it's a set-up for Endgame, myself included. That's all there is to it.