Captain Marvel Blasts Off

Captain Marvel is an exciting movie which struggles in the beginning but eventually comes together.

In the comics, there were several characters named Marvel, beginning with a strongman in DC Comics.  After Marvel negotiated the name rights almost 40 years ago, they rolled out a male Captain Marvel, who was really dull.  Think Mike Pence with a supersuit and ray gun.  Then they had a character named Ms Marvel, the use of Ms being an enormous milestone back in the day.  She was kind of like Wonder Woman, but a spacewoman instead of a
demigoddess.  She never took off, and so she tried several costume changes and became a mutant named Binary for a while, but she still wasn't all that cool. They kept trying different reboots of Captain Marvels and the comic universe was fairly bursting with different characters with the same name. A few years ago, they reintegrated the original Ms Marvel, Carol Danvers, with Captain Marvel and here we are.



The movie suffers from some of that problem.  They pursue too many story lines while trying to introduce the movie audience to an alien culture.  The biggest mistake they make is that we really do not identify with any of the characters in the entire civilization.  Even the main character is named Vers ("veers") and we get the idea that she is in some sort of military space force, but we don't get to know much about her other than she is an athletic space warrior and is troubled
by strange dreams. Her compatriots in the Kree are two dimensional and have no personalities, other than the male character who appears to be Vers' commanding officer and is kind of an a**hole.  Thus it is very difficult to sympathize with anyone in the first half of the movie, and very hard to care whether the various aliens are good guys or bad guys, and we know very little about Vers and why she is a warrior and what makes her tick.  This is a major fault.  You can enjoy special effects concerning downtown Kree, but forget about the plot.

In the second half of the movie, the movie shifts focus to Earth of the 1980s.   There is no particular reason for it to be
set in the past, but there we are. This is the low point of the movie, which is probably supposed to be hilarious as Veers discovers California of the 1980s. Nobody laughed at the theater I attended, however. From there, the movie picks up because we drop many of the complex story lines in the first half.  We are introduced to some characters who are more three dimensional, including  a female ex-US Air Force pilot and her daughter,  as well as Nick Fury and some of his agents from shield.  Most importantly we learn about Vers, her relationship with the late Carol Danvers and we start to understand the ethical dilemmas caused by her duties as a Kree warrior.  We also meet some aliens and learn about how they perceive themselves.  Of course there is an inevitable
battle in outer  space, and lots of gorgeous special effects.  

Overall, I thought the movie was well worth seeing, saved by the second half, and I would see it again.  However, the first half was forgettable, and you could probably skip it entirely.