An origin story for an eventual Dea Ex Machina

Rating: 5/10 (4 June 2019)

Positives:
Plot is put together competently with logical character motivation for Captain Marvel which also sets up a...
Reasonably well executed mystery with a big reveal that stops the plot going stale.
Good outfits and aesthetics like MCU films generally have.
Pushes the envelope for female MCU characterisations.
Cat gags which, for me, had just the right amount of silliness.
Acceptable dialogue quality.
Girl Power stuff, if that floats your boat.
Mostly good VFX.
90s nostalgia soundtrack.
Gemma Chan as Minn Erva... mmmmmmm....
Negatives:
CM doesn't really grow as a character, she merely gets to take off the metaphorical woolly mittens that the oppressor has sown onto the ends of her sleeves. Anything that would've been growth is in flashbacks.
A lot of the jokes and the ANSI standard Stan Lee cameo feel forced.
Corporate Feminism aka Pop Feminism, not feminism per se. This is its most reductive, men-as-the-oppressor form which means that it's really easy to churn out soundbites and rudimentary allegories with it, hence its popularity for wokewashing. What passes for character growth is just allegorical patriarchy smashing. If you're expecting groundbreaking feminist critique in this film, you will be even more disappointed than Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg.
Very unsubtly banging the Girl Power drum by setting the pre-bossfight to I'm Just A Girl but that might've annoyed me purely because I'm old enough to have heard that song about 10,000 times already.
Pre-bossfight is a bit meh (irrespective of the soundtrack) but luckily there was something to keep me entertained in the form of Gemma Chan as Minn Er... and then she gets whacked.
Final bossfight is woefully underdeveloped and exists only to get CM to level up to a superduperhero so that her powers don't seem non-sequitur in Avengers: Endgame. It's like beating a video game boss with a single button press.
CM has depth to her character through her backstory/memories but ends up lacking breadth. A scene which would've helped show another side to CM ended up on the cutting room floor because it would've introduced other plot elements too early.
Marvel Studios tried to do the double on marketing angles by combining a retro aesthetic (a proven hit in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)) with Woke Branding (a proven hit in Black Panther (2018)) and ended up with a middling MCU film, probably on a par with Thor: The Dark World (2013).
Ever since The Hunger Games (2012) demonstrated that strong female action characters are money on legs it was inevitable that the MCU would try to work more of them in. The success of Wonder Woman (2017) will have only strengthened their resolve on this point and you can see how women in the MCU have gradually progressed from supporting to more central roles over time. Marvel Studios presumably decided to for broke by giving a female lead a film all to herself while simultaneously not trying to soften her character in any way. The result of this is more or less a fighter jock without the Y chromosomes, with the cocksure and aloof nature that entails. This doesn't make her instantly likeable because nobody is used to this from female MCU superheroes but it bears comparison with Tony Stark, who is an annoyingly arrogant a lot of the time but tempers that with humour, something that CM fails at.
The best Marvel films create character growth by having the lead character brought low in some way so that their character can gain more breadth (usually in the form of humility) and then overcome whatever it was, saving the world and becoming a better person in the process. Vulnerability makes for better strong characters and invulnerability quickly gets boring. On this front Captain Marvel is painted into a corner as she becomes so powerful that it's difficult to see how she could be brought low to allow any further growth.