Back to Phase One?

Rating: 4/10 (26 April 2019)

I really wanted to like the film. I saw it last night and had none of the hype or politicising elements clouding things going into it.
... The movie was a huge mess. There was no character arc or development. From the trailer I assumed we'd see her character form through the army boot camp and childhood sequences but all they ended up being were some brief flashbacks that lent no emotional gravity. There was no development of her relationships with other characters, either. They had the buddy cop element with Sam but it was only fleshed out for about 5 minutes. Likewise with the other pilot chick. Likewise with Law's character. There was more investment in the character and arc of Mendelsohn's Skrull than for the protagonist of the movie.
The homage to 90s culture was occasionally cute but mostly incredibly jarring. Come As You Are playing in one scene just felt bizarre and out of place. Same when No Doubt came blasting during a fight. It was so forced and on the nose that I can't believe it made it past test audiences. In Guardians, the music was there because it served as an emotional anchor for Starlord. It fit perfectly there and helped elevate and give the movie a unique style. In Captain Marvel it felt like a desperate attempt to cram the style or sound of an era or time/place into the movie and it was done with no consideration for whether it fit. It was probably most off-putting because the visual style of the movie wasn't unique or remarkable in any way. Barring a few references like the Nine Inch Nails shirt and some great de-ageing CGI, nothing about the movie felt like we were back in time.
But for maybe two of the fight sequences, the action was mostly forgettable and poorly choreographed/edited. With a pedigree like Marvel's and them having honed fight sequences to near perfection over the course of a dozen movies, it felt like we were back at the first Thor or Captain America.
The movie was about as bland and uninspired as it gets. They had the opportunity or even a responsibility to tell a story about an important character and a woman overcoming adversity. Instead we had a protagonist with no arc beyond a past fleshed out through a few brief flashbacks. We should have spent a movie seeing a character grow and become eventually invested in them so that the final sequence with her standing up after getting knocked down felt like a powerful payoff. But we didn't and it didn't. We didn't see her struggle with adversity as a little girl. We didn't see her get beaten down by a culture of patriarchal machismo in the Airforce. We saw NONE of it. We saw a powerful demigod with a cocky attitude in the start and we saw the exact same thing in the end, just with more of a super Saiyan bent.
They had one job to do: Give a decent backstory and character arc to one of the most powerful beings in the franchise. Instead we got a couple of hours of filler to bridge the gap between two far superior movies and a wasted opportunity in the form of possibly the weakest Marvel movie in more than a decade. I would much rather be praising a great Marvel movie but I can't because the movie did nothing to earn it. If it was an entirely standalone movie outside of the MCU the movie would have been absolutely trashed. It gets a pass only on the fact that it serves as an introduction to a character that hopefully more competent writers and directors will utilise properly in the future.