DON'T CALL IT AN ORIGIN STORY...!

Rating: 7/10 (18 March 2019)

The latest MCU entry gives Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel her own feature (right before being drummed into the Avengers ranks in next month's End Game to do battle) so now audiences will get to see who this woman is & what exactly she'll bring to the Thanos party. Anyway, Marvel, known as Vers, is part of a Kree elite fighting unit holding the Skrull (a shape shifting malevolent race which I first remembered from the 60's Fantastic Four cartoon) at bay as they police the galaxy but due to a mishap when her team attempts to retrieve a spy from a desolate planet, Vers is captured & tortured by the Skrull to gain knowledge of a light speed engine who's creator (played by Annette Bening) died in protecting its location back on Earth. Vers escapes her captors, reaches Earth but soon, due to the after effects of her time spent w/the Skrulls, starts to doubt her existence as evidence shows she's from this planet & not a Kree as she was led to believe. Incorporating de-aging makeup again, we get a younger Nick Fury (& Coulson as well) teaming up w/the lost 'proud warrior' to right things before the truth overwhelms all involved. Handily written & directed by Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck (Sugar/Half Nelson), this film has to do mucho heavy lifting, bridging 2 important sequels, introducing a new character & being a female empowerment manifesto which it does successfully in spurts & starts but being most audiences just want to get this Cliff Notes version of the character & her background out of the way for the main course to come, no one's going to come away so distraught that they'll swear off Marvel forever.