I really wish this had been better

Rating: Null/10 (21 August 2019)

I'm not a huge know-it-all when it comes to Marvel movies. The first Marvel movie I saw was Guardians 2 in 2017, and I've seen most of the new ones since. But I loved Endgame so much that I decided to watch the entire MCU in chronological order from the Beginning, so Captain Marvel was the second movie on the list.
I thought about the movie for a couple of weeks after seeing it. I really really wished I could say it was good, but it really wasn't. I remembered all of the hate that surrounded the movie's release, and because it was the first female-led Marvel film I wished it was better. I've only seen 10 of the 23 movies so far, so my knowledge about the MCU is fairly limited, but I don't understand why the first female-led film in the series had to be Captain Marvel. It should've been Black Widow, she's been in this universe for ages and never got her own movie, and having just seen her in Iron Man 2 I absolutely loved her.
By far the criticism I've heard the most is what people call its "feminist agenda". In my opinion, there were a lot of people on both sides who either wanted this movie to fail or succeed for various reasons. Being a screenwriter myself I can tell you that if you see a movie that focuses on non-female characters, like most MCU films before Captain Marvel, the female characters can still be strong. There are tons of examples of this. Writing a movie with male main characters does NOT mean the female characters are weak, and writing a movie with female main characters does NOT mean the male characters are weak. In this movie? Everyone's really weak, regardless of their gender. Carol Danvers is super boring and flat, and while I like some of the other characters, they don't really have much to do. There's a scene where Ben Mendelsohn's character (I loved that he kept his Aussie accent btw) calls a character "young lady" in a kind of derogatory way, and if that had been the only time the movie addressed that men sometimes talk down to women I would've been fine with it, but there's another scene that was just so on the nose. Carol Danvers wanted to buy something and a guy on a motorcycle harassed her. Yes, it is not too uncommon for women to be harassed, especially back in the 90s, but was this scene really necessary? Instead of making a movie where men are portrayed as harassers, make a movie where people are strong regardless of their gender and work together, this is a much better way to promote gender equality in a movie. Aliens, for example, did it perfectly, and men LOVE that movie because, among many other reasons, it's damn good and featured a well-written female character.
Captain Marvel is a kind of good-looking movie, but the characters are flat, the acting is meh, it's boring, it feels much longer than it actually is, I didn't care about what's going on, it tried to talk about a lot of feminine topics, which is fine, but they are only very loosely connected, so the plot feels like a collection of shorts sometimes. I liked the humor, especially when Carol Danvers first arrived on Earth. People had no idea that aliens exist, and Carol Danvers had no idea how Earth works, which made for some really funny scenes. Beyond that, the movie doesn't have much going for it, which is very unfortunate.