CAPTAIN MARVEL (2019) in SPOILERVISION

By Marvel Studios standards Captain Marvel is relatively non-linear, which may be why it feels a little rough early on. We're immediately immersed in the adventures of some sort of space special-forces unit of the Kree empire, an entity moviegoers first encountered in Guardians of the Galaxy. The Kree are battling their traditional enemies, the shape-shifting Skrulls. One of the Kree team, a woman named "Veers" (Bree Larson) is the special protege of her commanding officer (Jude Law). Something about his team may give viewers pause, however; one of them is somebody (Djimon Hounsou) we've seen as a bad guy in Guardians. This is a minor detail compared to Veers' flashbacks, which focus on a middle-aged female (Annette Bening) who is also the form Veers sees when she communes with the Kree "Supreme Intelligence," which in comics is represented by a giant green blob-face. For each Kree, the Supreme Intelligence takes the form of someone familiar, but Veers has no idea who the woman is. Over the course of the film, she comes to realize there's a lot she doesn't know about herself. In fact, if I recall right, this is the first time Marvel has gone the "everything you thought you knew is wrong" route so familiar in genre fiction in general these days. The comics audience, of course, anticipates this, because they know that Veers is really Carol Danvers, the much-revamped heroine once known as Ms. Marvel, who was most recently upgraded into "Earth's Mightiest Hero. Watching the first half of Captain Marvel is a matter of waiting for Carol to rediscover the truth about herself, and that may explain why the early action has a somewhat perfunctory feel. There's nothing spectacularly original about the alien environment Veers works in; Hala, the Kree homeworld, looks pretty much like every other Marvel megalopolis, and there's little truly alien in a sci-fi sense about the Kree or the Skrulls, apart from the latters' morphing abilities. For a while, and maybe all the way through for some viewers, this film (directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck from a story and script from theirs and many other hands) feels like it might be the most generic, by-the-numbers Marvel movie of all apart from the title character's (who never uses that title) relatively nonlinear character arc.

It doesn't help that, when Veers goes crashing onto planet C-53 (i.e., Earth), it's the year of our lord 1995. In other words, cue the oldies soundtrack! Maybe I let this familiar marketing ploy bother me too much, since making movies out of Marvel Comics themselves is mere moneygrubbing from one point of view, but one might ask whether this film had to be set in the past at all, unless it's to market an oldies soundtrack. To be fair, also, this is far from the most cynical or implausible deployment of oldies (that would be Spider-Man: Homecoming). Still, there's something pandering about it that always leaves a bad taste in a killjoy mouth, but this will be just about my last complaint about Captain Marvel.

Anyway, it's 1995 and Veers crash-lands in a strip-mall Blockbuster Video, and who should be called onto the case but a young -- well, a younger Nicholas Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), who was a much less serious person a quarter-century ago. He also, understandably, had much smoother skin, and the CGI wizards deserve some credit for the job they did on him, though their treatment of Clark (Agent Coulson) Gregg leaves a lot more to be desired. A nice detail about this film, which stands at the brink of the end-of-an-era Avengers: Endgame, is that it brings the Marvel Cinematic Universe just about to full circle by showing us that his encounter with Carol, the Kree and the Skrulls provoked Fury to launch what he initially calls the Protector Initiative before Danvers gives him one more inspiration. Nevertheless, it's an odd turn from Jackson, most memorable for Fury's misplaced affection for a precocious cat, though again you can argue that it's this experience that made him more serious about things. Anyway, with him as tag-along, Carol rediscovers her past by tracking down her best friend and fellow jet pilot (Lashana Lynch), whose daughter may turn up in a future, present-day film as yet another Captain Marvel. It's a long story and I'll save it for when I need it.

Meanwhile, as noted, Carol learns that a lot of what she thought she knew was wrong -- and one cute thing the film does to make some of this surprising is to exploit the recent typecasting of Ben Mendelsohn (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Ready Player One, Robin Hood ...). He plays a Skrull agent who's taken the form of a S.H.I.E.L.D. commander in order to get at Veers, who has subconscious knowledge of an important science project the Annette Bening mystery woman was working on. But everything you thought you knew about Ben Mendelsohn is wrong! In this particular variation on the Kree-Skrull conflict, the green, waffle-chinned shapeshifters are the good guys, while the Kree are exploiting Carol Danvers by suppressing her memories of Earth as well as her full potential as a superbeing -- which once unleashed could be limitless. Since last year, Marvel has teased that Captain Marvel is the hero who can tip Thanos' precious balance, and watching her pull off Superman-style stunts like blowing up starships by flying through them may make more people believers. The directing team aren't really the most visionary or even efficient storytellers, but they do succeed at making Carol's realization of her full power, intercut with her memories of a lifetime of rising from adversity, an exhilarating moment, an ultimate comic-book power fantasy brought to cinematic life. While overall Captain Marvel is at best a mid-level Marvel movie, if its main purpose is to get people even more interested in Endgame, it probably should count as an unqualified success.