Captain Marvel (2019), dir. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

leaving a movie before it's over can feel quite liberating

Re: consequentiality of end credits: Well if the flerken contains multiple universes it’s possible the tesseract from the CM universe just appeared in the current Fury-less universe. I just thought of this I don’t know how flerken guts work FYI but I will revisit this in the future if I am right

I thought they made the case fairly clearly when she wiped out fleets of fighters and flew the long way through a dreadnought-style warship?

i meant, like, vis a vis thanos, not the other heroes

The implication at the end of Infinity War is that he's burnt out the gauntlet, so he's probably just like super-super-powerful now instead of God Mk. II.

ohhhhh

the notion of leaving a movie while there's still more movie left to watch

the credits junk isn't part of the movie! it's inherently extraneous to the movie! it's like saying you didn't really watch a home release if you didn't watch every extra on the disc/download

Pssssh.

Yeah, I said it.

If it's a part of the story and it's featured in the theatrical release, it's part of the movie. Although I'll concede that eg the mid-credits scene (which is actually a preview scene plucked from Endgame) and others of that ilk don't really count. You may not deem a scene of the Avengers having dinner important enough to stick around for but it's still the final scene of that particular film.

if you walk out of Wild Things when the credits start, you miss like 5 plot twists

ok, now I'm sol

*sold

Sorry, I left the theater before you had a chance to throw that 'd' out there so now I think you're actually the star that provides light and warmth to our planet DO U SEE

well, the marketing did that with HER going to HERO so it seems apt

the final, post-all-credits blip nearly made me hop out of my chair in an attempt to get that animal off the desk and on to a spot on the floor without a rug

You say blip, it felt like it took 10 minutes.

the credits junk isn't part of the movie! it's inherently extraneous to the movie!

part of the film, always

this 'product' idgas

You have a funny way of demonstrating that ydgas.

i liked this a lot. IMO Marvel has an incredibly surprising hit to miss ratio; only one Iron Man movie and one Thor movie have been 'eh' for me, everything else they've done has been good to exceptional.

passed by two adult men on the street the other day (before I saw this) who were saying 1) they didn't like the main character because she was smarmy 2) they thought she and her friend were going to kiss 3) 'too much politics, it's all in your face' (????).

I think you may have accidentally mistyped 'adult' there.

tfw your masculinity is so fragile that a fairly traditional superhero movie gets under your skin because it stars a woman who has mentioned feminism in interviews about it

yeah I couldn't tell after seeing the movie if they were talking about that, or about the refugee situation; either way, that's the sort of mentality we are up against.

The kind of mentality which can only be cured by keeping air-filled hypodermic needles on one's person at all times imo.

This was passable, but (keeping in mind I've only seen most of them once) probably the most inert and dull of the Marvel movies since the first Thor, and the direction particularly without distinction, at best. And at worst, well ... worse. Might have made a better mini-movie?

Question I had: why did it take until the end for her to notice and/or do anything about the dongle behind her ear?

Question my daughter had: if they had to digitally de-age Nick Fury for this one, won't they have to make Captain Marvel digitally older in the next Avengers movie?

I have lots of other questions, too, but whatev, it's a movie.

Because up until the latter half of the movie, she thought she was Native Kree and viewed that thing as the source of her powers rather than the thing limiting the powers she acquired from the blast

I mean they literally say "that which can be given can be taken away" at the beginning

magic flying power blast people don’t age

If she does a lot of FTL travel after the movie's events, one year for her might be 25 on earth.

But she's the only one with the ear dongle, right? Or, for that matter, laser fist powers? And she never acknowledges it, does she? Or does she react to it as some sort of inhibitor in that first sparring session? I already forgot (clearly). Anyway, kind of wacky that she's just, at the end, all, well, I suppose I'll just take this thing off my neck. Pop. Also, she could blast with her fists with the dongle on, but without it she could ... blast harder? And fly? Not clear how she's the most powerful character in the MCU or whatever, anymore than Hulk or Thor or other nigh impervious creatures. I guess we'll find out?

Do they explain (or did I miss) why she and (more or less) Jude Law look human but all the other Kree are blue?

Did I see somewhere that Feige gave some explanation for why Fury wouldn't have called her earlier, for previous alien invasions and stuff?

All this stuff is not uniquely problematic or anything. This one could have been airtight and still would have been pretty dull. I really do blame the directors in this instance.

A couple of times during this I flashed back to "The Hidden." I wonder why no one has remade that one?

the problem with this movie is, it’s a story about her, but it’s not her story.

The MCU's Kree problem, I will concede, is that every single Kree depicted prior to this film has been blue. It's well established in the comics that there are both blue- and pink-skinned Kree, but yeah, it's hard to put that notion across when we only ever see one example of the latter onscreen.

And the Kree have been used extensively on Agents of SHIELD so they've had ample opportunity to establish this state of affairs before now.

who cares, there are human-looking ones

this is the stupid crap that gets chalked up as “plot holes” by fastidious idiots now but are just points not specifically spelled out

they show a Kree that looks human in Jude Law, so we know some look human. whatever!

Er, did you guys miss the fact that Djimon Hounsou's character wasn't blue either, nor was he in Guardians of the Galaxy? So clearly the Kree have a variety of skin tones.

I already forgot (clearly)

I mean this kindly, but this isn't really the movie's fault? The answer is yes, though, they establish that she thinks it's the source of her power early on (as Neanderthal said in response to your first question)

All in all, I thought this was pretty good. It was a very classic superhero origin story, with the introduction of her background, her supporting cast, her main conflict, etc. It didn't much of the tongue-in-cheek humour, where they make gentle fun of superhero and sci-fi tropes, which has been a trademark of most recent Marvel movies... But I thought that was fine. This was a fairly serious story about identity, war, and racism, so too much humour and lightness of tone wouldn't have worked.

Agree with people who said the fight scenes didn't work that well... This also suffered from the original sin of 2000s speculative fiction of making everything look pointlessly grey and darkly lit, even though the GotG and Ragnarök had already shown to glorious effect how much better sci-fi can look with loads of colour. That said, I did like the final action scene with Cap Marvel just crashing into the huge Kree warships, that was exhilarating!

I think the biggest problem with the movie wasn't the action scenes though, cos this was mostly a story-driven flick, and the main story with the Kree/Skrull war was nicely done (and I liked how they subverted the comic book readers' expectations of what the Skrull are like). I think the main flaw was that in wanting to present Carol Danvers as a good-hearted and indomitable hero, they didn't really give her any, you know, flaws. Which ultimately made Fury a more interesting and fun character in the movie than its actual protagonist.

IMO the Wonder Woman movie had the same issue, and it's kinda understandable, when you're doing your first superhero movie with a female lead, the desire to make her into a role model little girls and other fans can look up to must be strong... But that can also make her boring. The other Marvel female heroes, such as Black Widow or Scarlet Witch or Jessica Jones, were written as flawed right from the start, and that worked fine with them. And I don't mean they should just add any flaws into Cap Marvel's character as if that automatically makes it better (please don't introduce her alcoholism from the comics into the movies), but I do hope later movies will make her more rounded.

I mean this kindly, but this isn't really the movie's fault?

Every single JiC “saw this movie” post is “Pretty good! But I noted 19 glaring plot holes, and on the walk to the car my kids detailed that 12 of them were explained onscreen or never happened, but then they got fed up and refused to address any more of my observations, so here are 7 whopping plot holes that I don’t get why nobody else is talking about?”

(Followed by someone explaining six of them, and Josh going “well, I don’t remember that at all. Therefore [continues to talk about one of those six]”)

Fair enough! I still think the movie was dull, and that aspect I remember.

The only reason I bring up my kids, btw, is to share their perspective, seeing as they are ostensibly a significant intended audience of films like these. So yeah, if my 11-year old girl has an opinion or observation about a superhero movie that's partly being marketed to girls, I'm gonna share it. But I don't have to, that's cool, too.

I think we pretty much all agree this movie is "fine."

I am absolutely not discounting your kids’ contributions to the discourse!

Ha, I wish she had more to say! Though to be fair, apple doesn't fall far from the tree: when the first mid-credits sequence popped up and we see Captain America, she turned to me and whispered "who's that?"

She didn't know Black Widow, either, and yet weirdly, she did recognize Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk. Go figure. I guess it's a lot to ask anyone to keep track of all these people and plot threads across x number of movies that kicked off when she was born.

Hah, to me actually the biggest plot hole was that in the scene after Carol crashes to Earth, and she's phoning Yon-Rogg, on the background you see promo posters for various albums that came out in 1995... But there's also several shiny-and-new looking posters for Leonard Cohen's The Future, which came out in 1992, and AFAIK wasn't that successful except in Canada. So why would there still be pristine posters for it around in 1995?

huge if true

Lol

Well, it is called "The Future!" Anyway, plausible hand-wave: a couple of songs from "The Future" played a big role on the "Natural Born Killers" soundtrack, released in 1994 and curated by Trent Reznor. So there's your connective tissue!

Why were there retro '70s toys on the space lab, like an old pinball game, a Nerf gun and a Fonz lunchbox? I saw some online commentary from someone too young to know who referenced those things as among the '90s signifiers.

Oh, here's some more (this time honest) confusion from me: how did she get to earth? I thought she was captured in some other galaxy, and that the Skrulls didn't have FTL engines? At least, that's what I thought happened. When she called Jude Law from the payphone I could have sworn he mentions how far away he/she was.

The Skrulls were orbiting Earth because they knew the FTL engine was somewhere there. They just needed to pick Carol's brain to get the exact location.

Previous Marvel movies like the GotG ones have established that FTL is possible, but they need to use something called jump points, and you can't use too many in a row, so travel to other parts of the galaxy still takes time, cos the distances not covered by the jump points need to be covered with regular engines. We see Carol's team use a jump point in the beginning of the movie, and in the finale it's a plot point that it takes hours for Ronan's starships to arrive after Yon-Rogg calls them, because there is no jump point in Earth's vicinity.

Presumably a FTL engine powered by the Space Stone would allow for spaceships to travel much faster, and without relying on jump points.

" a Nerf gun" apparently that nerf gun model was introduced in 1992.

Also in the final battle Carol is clearly holding a Pred ship

Mar-Vell’s ship notably used predator-derived cloaking tech