This latest Marvel Studios expansion pack stars Oscar winnerBrie Larsonas an amnesiac.
(Shes haunted by memories of Annette Bening, as all the best humans are.)
First comes the intergalactic war.
Chuck Zlotnick/©Marvel Studios 2019
In one corner: the shapeshifting Skrulls.
In the other corner: The Kree, basically humanity with more blue people.
The Kree take orders from the Supreme Intelligence, a complicated bio-organic collective consciousness computeramabob.
The Supreme Intelligence has an important mission for a special crew of coed military grunts.
Every squadmate has a unique skillset.
Vers (Larson) is the muscle, wielding fiery fists of photon energy.
Minn-Erva (Gemma Chan) is the laconic sniper.
The commanding officer (Jude Law) doles out gruff sensei advice.
A new assignment sends the team to a planet of ruins.
The first acts frontloaded with cool space stuff, never to be repeated!
The movie takes a detour to planet C-53, a blue spheroid locals call Earth.
Its a real shole, says Minn-Erva, her words echoing our own Supreme Intelligence, unfortunately.
The Skrulls could be paranoia-inducing bodysnatchers,Twilight Zone-ing communities apart from within.
But the action-addled plot makes the Skrulls extremely findable, and punchable.
One thrilling sequence sends Larson pummeling through an elevated MTA train.
In our mid-90s, Jackson was working with Geena Davis amnesiac assassin inThe Long Kiss Goodnight.
InCaptain Marvels mid-90s, he shows up as Nick Fury, younger-looking and still a biclops.
Jackson has played the S.H.I.E.L.D.
agent in, I counted, 47 movies since 2008sIron Man.
And this is his finest hour in the megafranchise!
Meanwhile, Larsons troubled by confusing flashbacks.
In those memories, she has a trusty compadre, another groovy aviatrix named Maria (Lashana Lynch).
Some Iceman wannabe explains its called a cockpit for a reason, get it?
Larson is the first female to headline her own Marvel Studios movie.
anxious about its own feminism.
Larson remembers a struggle to be taken seriously the Air Force didnt even allow female fighter pilots until 1993!
but those memories are locked away from her current Kreeward existence.
Until very late in the film, shes a bystander to her own heros journey.
Im losing track of what is a spoiler and what isnt.
Another performer might have tried to sort through this motivation blitzkrieg.
Larson has a disarmingly low-key delivery, chasing aliens across planets like shes counting the minutes to lunchbreak.
Shes well-matched by an antagonist played by Ben Mendelsohn, sorry, meant to write BEN MENDELSOHN!
His role inCaptain Marvelis something different, and something special.
We meet him as a Skrull with one accent, and then hes a human with another accent.
Also, there is a really great cat.
The movies treatment of its source material is clever.
The 1995 setting is occasionally fun, a little thin.
Is there a deeper read on the nostalgia?
The Air Force memories explicitly conjure 1986s propagandoid cheesefestTop Gun.
(The supporting feline Fury loves is called Goose, homaging Anthony Edwards doomed copilot.)
Theres the inadvertent ghost of a Sylvester Stallone reference buried in Marias last name, Rambeau.
And 1995 was the year Samuel L. Jackson costarred in the second-bestDie Hardmovie alongside Bruce Willis.
So thats all Planet Hollywood, and Tom Cruise, too.
He only got the name Captain Marvel because, no joke, being Captain Marvel was his daddys job.
We have not left him behind.
Those broad strokes describe the hedonist-with-father-issues version of Tony Stark we met in 2008sIron Man.
At a moment of high tension, Mendelsohns Skrull says: I get it!
Were all a little on edge!
But Not Bad is better than where were coming from.B
Related content:
