Captain Marvel (2019)

This was supposed to be posted on Monday.  :-(    Is it me or does 2019 feel like it's just starting and January and February were leftovers from 2018?  This feels like the first release of the new year, maybe because it's kicking off blockbuster season, and maybe because it's the last lead-up to Avengers:  Endgame.  We are in the home stretch, people.  Just don't die before the end of April.

Vers (Brie Larson) is a member of an elite team of Kree warriors, locked in a battle against the shapeshifting Skrull.  She has no memory of her life before waking up six years previously on the Kree world of Hala.  While chasing a Skrull cell, Vers crashes onto planet C-53, commonly known as Earth, and discovers that the Skrulls are looking for a woman named Dr. Wendy Lawson (Annette Benning) that they believe holds the key to a faster-than-light engine.  The more Vers investigates, the more she comes to believe that she personally knew Dr. Lawson, that she had a life on Earth as a human, and that her identity is actually Captain Carol Danvers, USAF. 

I'm trying really hard to be vague about the plot because it works better if you uncover the layers just like Carol does.  A number of actors in the film go against type and it's so much fresher to experience it, rather than have me tell you about it. 

In many ways, this is a prototypical Marvel origin story.  Carol Danvers is set up as an above average person (fighter pilot) who suffers a serious personal loss (missing memories) and must decide where her loyalties lie in a world of shifting allegiances (Kree/human) based on her personal integrity.  You can sub in Stephen Strange, Tony Stark, or T'Challa in the above sentence and get the same effect with just a few detail shifts.  Does that make her story any less entertaining?  No.  Less valid?  No.  Less important?  No.

It's a big deal that this is the first female-led Marvel movie since this sets the bar (and opens the door) for other female characters to take center stage.  You can bet that if this had gotten bad or even middling reviews, someone would be pulling the plug on the Black Widow movie this very instant.  In that respect, I think Marvel made the right call by having a more generic storyline that doesn't risk polarizing critics and audiences.  They've got this down to a science at this point. 

Larson is great as Captain Marvel, bringing a ton of energy and steely-eyed fierceness to the role.  Samuel L. Jackson and Clark Gregg reprise their roles as Agents Fury and Coulson, respectively,  like they've been playing them for the past decade.  Ben Mendelsohn and Jude Law are always top-notch but they really come out swinging as combatants on opposite sides of an alien war. 

Of course, the true standout of the movie is Goose, played by four excellent cat actors.  I am here for her spin-off, whenever that may be.