Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the next post in my series covering the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This time, we are going back to the 1990s with “Captain Marvel”. This movie stars Brie Larson as Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, Ben Mendelsohn as Talos, Jude Law as Yon-Rogg, Gemma Chan as Minn-Erva, and Clark Gregg as Phil Coulson. This movie shows Carol Danvers’ development into the hero named Captain Marvel as a battle between the Kree and the Skrulls happens. Let’s get into detail on how this movie went down.
The Marvel Studios logo features Stan Lee a lot since this was the first movie in the MCU to come out after he passed away in late 2018. It is a nice tribute to the man who helped create many Marvel characters, including the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, X-Men, and many others. After the logo, we see Carol wake up from a dream she had in 1995. She looks out the window as we see that she is in Hala, which is the capital of Kree civilization. She knocks on Yon-Rogg’s door and asks him to fight her. Carol doesn’t remember anything from her past while she is training. She ends the fight by blasting him with her fist blast. That is not the full power of her abilities due to her having a chip on her neck. We then see Carol talk with the Supreme Intelligence (Annette Bening). Carol is told that she is not yet ready, but is able to go on a mission with Minn-Erva and a few others. One of those people was the guy who questioned Star-Lord in “Guardians of the Galaxy”: Korath. Their mission is to rescue one of their spies on the planet Torfa. They arrive quickly thanks to a jump point and land underwater. Once they get out of the water, they make their way closer to the enemies. Minn-Erva is surprised by a skrull, but she takes care of it. It turns out that they are all skrulls, which are creatures that can morph into any human being or hero. The mission was an ambush, and Carol gets kidnapped by the skrulls. We then see a flashback of Carol as an Air Force pilot and then earlier than that when she crashed a go-kart. It then flashes forward to military training when she falls off a rope. After these multiple memory flashbacks, which also includes a cat named Goose, we see Carol on the ship. It turns out that Talos had access to all of these memories from her past. He wants information from her regarding a light speed engine. She escapes from her trap and fights off the skrulls. She says that she doesn’t remember a lady named Wendy Lawson before running and fighting more skrulls, even with her hands trapped. She burns the traps and gets her hands out of them. She almost gets sucked into space, but she is able to get on the ship. She steals a pod and flies away from the exploding ship. The pod is malfunctioning and she falls into a Blockbuster store on Earth (C-53). She blasts a cardboard head off of a True Lies cardboard display before getting out of the store. She asks a security officer where to find communication devices. He points her to a Radio Shack before we cut to Skrulls at the beach. She is able to talk with her people and ask them if they are ok, which they are. She tells them that the Skrulls are looking for Watson. After the call is over, Nick Fury and some others at SHIELD (including Coulson) arrive to Carol. She tells Fury that skrulls are invading the earth. She is about to be arrested when they get ambushed by a skrull disguised as a human. She runs and jumps up to a train to catch up to a train to catch up with him. There is a nice Stan Lee cameo in which she gives a smile to him. She walks further in the train before she punches an old lady, who turns out she to be a skrull. She climbs up to the top of the train to fight the skrull while Fury is in pursuit. She blasts a hole in the train to not get hit by a tunnel. Elsewhere, it turns out that Coulson in the car is disguised as a skrull. Fury crashes the car to kill the fake Coulson. Once he gets out of the car, he covers the body with his jacket. We see Carol get out of the train and walk upstairs and go to an Internet cafe. She holds a big map and then steals an outfit from a display.
Meanwhile, we see Fury with a colleague of his named Keller while looking at the skrull body. Fury is still on the lookout for “Blockbuster Girl” as he walks away from the room. It turns out that Keller is secretly with the skrulls. Carol drives the motorcycle down the desert and stops at a bar where she sang karaoke when she was younger. The special crystal that she picked up is something that can help Carol retrieve her memories. Fury is at the bar as well to talk with Carol. Fury tells her that he is 100 percent human and that he was involved in the Cold War. Carol destroys the jukebox with a photon blast to prove that she is not a skrull before they both drive elsewhere. She tells Fury that she needs to get to Dr. Lawson before the skrulls get to her. They arrive at the Joint Dark Energy Mission Facility in Nevada. Fury uses tape with a fingerprint to get out of their room. On the way, they see a cat named Goose. They get to the records room via her photon blast. They found Lawson’s records and her plans for the light speed engine. They see a picture of a crash that happened in 1989 involving the engine. Fury walks elsewhere when Carol sees a picture of herself as an Air Force pilot. During a call with Von-Rogg, Carol learns that Lawson was a Kree named Mar-Vell. Fury tries to locate Carol before Keller (secretly Talos) sees him and he hides. Fury then fights Keller and gets hurt during the fight. Carol saves Fury from any more damage and they both run from the authorities. They escape via a giant plane with Goose as a stowaway. They fly to Louisiana to meet up with Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) and her family. When they arrive, Rambeau and her daughter Monica were surprised that Carol is alive. Carol burns a teapot as a display of her abilities before she and Maria talk with each other. Maria is confused with the fact that Lawson is from a different planet. Monica shows Carol some photos that revealed more about her past. They are interrupted when Talos invaded the home. Fury is ready to kill him, but Talos tells them that he has a black box that was rescued from the plane crash in 1989. Talos and his partner Norex convince them to negotiate a temporary alliance. We then see a flashback of the plane crash involving Carol and Lawson. The landing was safe until the plane crashes into a rock. They both get out of the plane before Lawson reveals to her that her name is Mar-Vell. Mar-Vell is shot before she was able to shoot the engine. We also see that it was Yon-Rogg himself who staged this plane crash. Carol shoots the engine, which gave her the special abilities that will be shown off in its full capacity later. After that flashback, Carol walks out of the room and told Talos that he lied to her about everything. Talos tells Carol that the skrulls are living as refugees when their planet was destroyed by the Kree. Carol is angry about the whole thing until Maria reminds her who she is and they hug each other. They figure out to get to where the core is before Yon-Rogg gets to it. Maria is hesitant about going, but her daughter convinces her to go. Carol tells Monica that she can’t wear Kree colors anymore. Her suit eventually changed to the colors of the United States, with a bit of yellow. Yon-Ragg confronts Carol after he lands on Earth and shoots her. It turns out that the Carol in the room was a skrull in disguise (Norex). Yon-Ragg then tells Ronan (Lee Pace) that skrulls have invaded Earth.
Meanwhile, Carol, Maria, Fury, Talos, and Goose are flying to the lab via the Quadjet. They go beyond the Earth into space to find the lab. Once in the ship, they all go to the lab that contains the core (which is the Tesseract). They also find some stuff from Earth, including a pinball machine. Talos is reunited with his wife and daughter, among other skrulls. Carol tells her that she is sorry about the skrull vs. Kree war. Yon-Ragg and his team arrive to them and confront them. Carol is taken to talk with the Supreme Intelligence while the rest are put into custody. Carol tells her to let her go while we see Goose with a muzzle on. Carol tells Mar-Vell that the skrulls are fighting for a home. She sees her memories one more time in a crazy vision before taking off her restraining neck thing and showing off her full powers. What follows is her easily taking care of the enemies and rescuing her friends. The cat uses the tentacles to put the tesseract in its mouth before Fury is told to get the skrulls away. She then fights the Star-Force while Goose eats up some bad guys. Fury and Maria are taken to the ship with what turns out to be Talos in disguise while Carol fights with Yon-Ragg and the others. Talos is shot by Yon-Ragg unexpectedly, but the Quadjet is flying back to earth. Carol falls down to earth, but she gets the strength to fly again. Maria shoots the pod and kills Minn-Erva. Carol rescues her friends from Yon-Ragg and then destroys a whole bunch of Kree ships that arrived near Earth. Every ship is destroyed by just her, except for three of them. Ronan tells everyone to retreat while Carol takes care of Yon-Ragg on Earth. She tells him to go back to Hala to reveal all the lies. On the ship, Fury’s eye gets scratched out by Goose (which is a lame ending to that “trust” thing). Later, we see the skrulls take a temporary residence at Maria’s home until Carol finds them a more permanent one. Carol tells Fury to keep the Tesseract hidden on Earth. She then gives him a pager to use only in emergencies (the same one we saw in the post credit scene in “Infinity War”). Carol then says goodbye to Maria and Monica before she flies away to space. Fury renamed the initiative to the “Avenger Initiative” in Carol’s honor. In a mid-credits scene, we see Carol meet up with Steve Rogers, Natasha, Banner, Rhodes at the Avengers facility in New York while they were inspecting the pager. She is asking where Fury is before the credits roll. There is a teaser that says: “Captain Marvel will return in Avengers: Endgame.” All we see after the credits is Goose puking out the Tesseract.
This movie is just ok to me. I was intrigued about the Skrulls, who can morph into anyone they come into contact with for both good and bad reasons. They are still interesting to see thanks to the Secret Invasion show on Disney+, which will be covered later. My favorite parts of the movie were the 1990s scenes. Seeing a Blockbuster store in the movie reminded me that I used to shop there to rent video games as well as movies before Netflix came along. It was cool to see a younger version of Nick Fury and seeing Coulson again for the first time since “The Avengers” (for the record, I have no intention to cover Agents of SHIELD, which Coulson was a part of). Samuel L. Jackson was great as Fury once again. Brie Larson was fine as Carol Danvers. I was glad that she was able to take care of her former teammates because I had no connection to them. The worst of them was Yon-Ragg, who wanted Carol to control her powers even though he didn’t have any powers at all. No offense to Jude Law, but the character was just not interesting to me. What I also didn’t like was the reveal that Fury lost his left eye due to the cat scratching it. Back in “The Winter Soldier”, Fury told Steve Rogers that he lost his eye during the last time he trusted someone. So much for that mystery. At least that cat had crazy tentacles and helped the heroes win. I did like the scenes in the Rambeau home, including the reunion of Carol and Maria. Some things are confusing, especially the multiple memory scene in which we see Carol at various stages of her life all at once. Also, the skrulls should have landed on Earth a bit after Carol did instead of during the day. The fight scenes were just ok to me. I didn’t feel a lot of emotions during it because I knew that Carol was going to live at the end since this movie took place in the 1990s. For me, the best part of this movie was the train scene. Seeing Stan Lee and Carol smile at each other was touching.
Overall, “Captain Marvel” was mostly a “meh” movie. There were a few moments that were funny and heartwarming, but I just felt no emotion for the key characters in the movie. Since it took place in the 1990s, there was no worry for me about the heroes surviving the movie. The next movie, however, will give me plenty of emotions to feel. That movie is the completion of the two-part culmination of the Infinity Saga: “Avengers: Endgame”. That post will come out soon. In the meantime, I hope you all have a great day.
(Here is the video from How It Should Have Ended on this movie. All credit goes to them.)
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