Yes! The Marvel universe has a Superwoman!! plus: thoughts on Troll-Free Ratings (TFRs)..

Rating: 8/10 (8 March 2019)

I've seen this movie twice now. The first time through it felt a little disjointed, but I'm happy to say that the second time through the various pieces fell together better. The whole storyline is essentially one uninterrupted sequence beginning with Carol on the Kree home planet Hala, through the guerilla mission against the Skrulls, and on to Earth where she meets Nick Fury and pieces out her true identity. There are really no side plots. My thoughts overall:

First and most basic, this is a new Marvel Studios movie to have fun with. It's another chance to sit back and absorb yourself in a gratifying fantasy world with superheros doing their thing. What's not to like? The usual great production values, and a stacked cast including Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Jude Law, Annette Bening, Ben Mendelsohn, Gemma Chan -- and of course the scene-stealing cat Goose (whose character poster has just been voted the fan favorite).

Before I forget to mention this: the end credits are beautifully done. They have the same style and feel as the credits from Wonder Woman (2017), which were also beautiful. Kudos!

I'm pretty sure most of us in the theater were waiting for the second half where Carol finally goes full Binary mode (as briefly shown in the second trailer) and sure enough this carries a great Wow! factor. We haven't seen this kind of mid-air (or mid-space) heavyweight fight sequence since Man of Steel, which qualifies her for the MCU's Superwoman. I'm *never* going to get tired of watching that section and have my fingers crossed that we'll get more in Avengers Endgame. Also, I was wondering how they were going to do the costume transition from the rather cold green/blue tones of the Kree into the warmer, much more appealing classic red/blue design. The way it's done is really clever.

But I'll probably just have to get used to Brie Larson's fairly light-textured voice. Like some others who've commented on this, I would have preferred it to have more weight (compare the voices of Bening or Chan in this movie). But my daughter assures me that it's all OK. if it's fine with younger viewers in the audience (particularly girls) who are seeing themselves represented on screen, then I won't complain.

On the other hand, the most important bit of dialog in the movie comes very near the end where Carol pronounces "I have nothing to prove to you" to one of the key characters in a way that takes the classic stereotypical "final confrontation of hero with villain" scene and stands it on its head. Right on!! There are a number of feminist-flavor statements or setups throughout the film, but that one scene is where it really does hit home.

From the trailers I think a lot of us figured that this "origin story" was going to depart significantly from the comic-book origins of CM (which the MCU has done with a number of other important characters). But ... yes and no. First, half the scenes in the trailers never appeared in the movie. But second, the story ended up hewing surprisingly close to the line in the CM comics, with just a couple of character switches. It's ingeniously done. There is just one MAJOR change from the comics storyline vis-a-vis the Kree and Skrulls, which I won't give away, and which works well enough and also retroactively ties in with certain plot elements of the the Agents of Shield TV series.

The well publicized motion-capture and de-aging of Fury and Coulson is pretty good, but the technique is still not seamless (Coulson particularly looked somewhat artificial). It would just make more sense to me, if something is set well in the past, not to spend a lot of screen time on familiar characters de-aged.

Bottom line for me is that this is a good movie, without being the MCU's best. It does however fill a necessary step in the extended Avengers/Thanos/etc. storyline that has been building up for so long. Yes CM does push social boundaries, but not as much as Black Panther did. What I mean is that for BP, virtually the entire cast were black. To be equally radical for women, the MCU needs to make a movie where almost all the superheros are female ... and to point out the obvious, they've already made a bunch where they're almost all male, so why not? Let's have it, Marvel!
OK: now for the trolls, who sadly but predictably jumped on the ratings for CM just like they said in their ludicrous flame-wars before its release. I REALLY wish the rest of us didn't have to waste our time with these hypersensitive misogynists whose only aim is to destroy. However, what's new about their pathetically nasty reactions to CM is that finally these have become outrageous enough that they have provoked collective counterattacks at the institutional level, not just from individuals. The Rotten Tomatoes site has taken steps to purge them, and the entire Disney corporation has actually stepped in with its own response. Not that I'm automatically in favor of what Disney does (e.g. their gutless firing of director James Gunn from Guardians of the Galaxy), but in this case I think they are doing the right thing. Society has to work out a better way to prevent the damages that trolling, hate speech, and misogyny can wreak. And a necessary step is just what's happening now -- to expose them for what they are in the cold light of day.
However, in the meantime we need to have some tools to get Troll-Free Ratings (TFRs) for the movies we care about. Fortunately, IMdB provides the material to do that, because unlike other sites it actually supplies full breakdowns of the viewer voting. Here's how to use the IMdB scores easily and conveniently to get a TFR:

First look at the bar graph of the voters' ratings (which you get by clicking on the number of voters just below the mean score). For CM you'll see a pile of votes in the 1/10 bin. Those are the trolls. Eliminate that bin from the average, and you'll get a much more accurate score. Even quicker, look at the "median" rating which does better than the average at de-weighting extremely low or high votes. (Just for fun, look at how CM rates with "females under 18" versus "males over 45".)

Better yet, just look at the shape of the bar graph and it's obvious where the true center is. For CM, it's about 7.5, and I think that's fairly much on the mark. This center is technically called the mode of the distribution, and there is a useful statistical rule of thumb to calculate it, which is this: mode = 3 (median) - 2 (mean). For example, at the time when I'm writing this, CM has 86,475 votes with a mean of 6.8 (heavily dragged down by more than 11,000 trolls) and a median of 7. The mode is then 7.4. The "mode" is a terrific way to get the TFR.

BUT: (and this is important): the great majority of IMdB voters are male, whereas the moviegoing public is pretty much half-and-half male and female. So a still better thing to do, after you've cut out the trolls, is to take the men's rating and average it *equally* with the women's rating. Thanks to IMdb showing these details broken down by age and gender, you can do that. Women do rate CM higher, but once you eliminate the troll votes it's actually not much higher. than the men.

As a final thought, you'll see a pileup of votes in the 10/10 bin too. So are these people "anti-trolls"? Not necessarily. I would argue that a 10/10 vote here is a lot more likely to be sincere and representative of the movie's impact on that viewer than a 1/10 vote is. The aim of an absurdly low vote is to destroy, whereas the aim of an only-slightly-high vote is to promote. Here I'll side with the promoters.