Oh Captain, My Captain

Maybe it’s just me, but I think the Marvel comic movies are just getting better and better. I loved the latest one we watched, Captain Marvel (2019).

It starts on the Kree home world, with Brie Larson waking up from a nightmare on a battlefield. She heads to Jude Law’s place to work off some steam training. We find out that she has amnesia, and also can shoot some kind of blasts from her hands.

The Kree are a martial race in conflict with the shapeshifting Skrull. The Kree-Skrull wars were one of my favorite bits of Marvel lore, but mostly because I never really knew anything about them. The Skrull were introduced in Fantastic Four, but I never read the Captain Marvel series, so I missed all the history. Instead, it was a bit of cosmic backstory, sometimes referred to but never explained - and I liked it that way. In this movie, we get some of the story, but some is sort of skipped over. For one thing, Kree are famously blue-skinned, but there’s a comment about picking someone who you respect and looking like them - so Kree are shapeshifters too? Anyway, Larson is not blue, for whatever reason.

But a shapeshifting Skrull, Ben Mendelsohn, kidnaps Larson and there’s a big space battle, and Larson winds up on Earth in the 90s. In fact, she crashes into a Blockbuster video (and blasts Arnold’s head off of a True Lies standee). Agents Coulson and Fury are dispatched to pick her up - both Clark Gregson and Samuel L. Jackson digitally de-aged, and Fury with both eyes. In time, we find that Larson was a Air Force pilot, Carol Danvers, believed dead. And the two lives, her Kree and human sides, come together.

There’s a lot more, of course - especially a marmalade cat called Goose who isn’t really a cat. It seems that Fury is kind of a cat person. The Skrulls turn out to be a lot less evil then we all thought, except Mendelsohn’s accent (I read it as Jewish cockney, but whatever) was to cute for him to be a villain. Then there’s the Tesseract and the fate of the galaxy. Lots of action, adventure, some comedy, girl power, and a tie-in to the Avengers: Endgame.

Like I said, maybe it’s just me. I do tend to like most movies I see - after all, a lot of time, money and talent went into making them. And there’s no big reason for me to love this. Guardians added humor to the MCU, Logan had pathos. This seemed like just a solid, firing on all cylinders Marvel movie. Whatever will they do next.