A missed opportunity

Rating: 1/10 (20 March 2019)

There's been a lot of excitement surrounding the release of this movie with one side wanting it to do well to support their camp, and the other side wanting it to fail to support theirs.
I don't care about that either way. I just want to be entertained by a good superhero movie which continues the story that Marvel has been telling for the last 10 years. Unfortunately, this isn't one of the better ones. I found it to be very mediocre and forgettable. And that's really as charitable as I can be with this movie.
Brie Larson certainly looks the part, but based upon her performance it seems like she was miscast in the role. Her time on screen is spent vacillating between looking indifferent and an unidentifiable expression, which many have attributed to smugness, for most of the movie. Personally I found it to be a bit off-putting and not only was the Carol Danvers character unlikable as a result, it also kept pushing me out of the movie by making it hard to suspend my disbelief.
Unfortunately, it goes downhill from here.
The underlying subtext of the movie is female empowerment, which is fine. Comic books are allegories, and always have been, at least when it comes to Marvel Comics. It's one of the (many) things I love about comics, but there's a fine line when creating these kinds of stories. They still have to be relatable and engaging, and ultimately entertaining, which is something that the comic book industry does quite well (for the most part). If you lean a little too far towards the underlying subtext then it looks a little ham-fisted and people perceive it as propaganda. And that's what happens here; it's so busy trying to be a feminist film that it forgets to be a superhero movie.
It's clear that Marvel (and ultimately Disney) is trying to capitalise on the current zeitgeist, which is a bit of a departure for them. Past efforts have been focused more on telling entertaining stories which remained reasonably faithful to the source material. This movie doesn't do that and as such has a different look and feel than its predecessors. So much so that it doesn't really feel like a Marvel movie at all.
An unfortunate side effect of this are the changes made to existing characters, both from the source material and the MCU itself. In this movie Nick Fury doesn't resemble the character we've seen over the course of his appearances in 11 of the MCU movies. His character is not bad within the context of the narrative they're trying to support, but his actions are not congruent with what we've seen and know about that character. On the back of that, having him lose his eye to a cat is a disservice to the character and shows that the filmmakers don't really have any respect for the source material or, I would argue, the fans.
It's the casual fan base which underwrites the financial viability of these movies, not the fringe elements. When you dogmatically service these elements specifically, on one side or the other, you risk marginalizing the culture we love by forcing out this casual fan base.
Personally, I enjoyed Alita: Battle Angel much more as a female empowerment movie. These two films essentially have the same plot, but the execution of the story, of the allegory, is done more competently in Alita with characters that are more fully formed, coupled with superior performances from the actors. It's a superior movie in every way and I recommend seeing this one instead and giving Captain Marvel a miss.