Captan Mar-Vell

Yeah, it's the latest movie. Most likely a lot of you have already seen it, and otherwise have made decisions to see it or not, so don't let me stop you.

However, rather than talk about the plot, I'm just going to get into it. I will need to discuss one or two elements, but nothing that spoilery, but feel free to skip if you want to. And the fact that this is a female lead movie isn't a problem, although it may lie at the heart of the issue.

The main issue I have with this movie is that... at no time did I get the sense that Captain Marvel was in any real danger. She just acted competently at every moment and always seemed in command of what was going on, that the threat level of the scenes were way down. Even when she just turns up on earth, and has to deal with our backward environment after having been raised Kree, and with Kree technology, and no point is there anything that's hard for her to deal with. (You can excuse that by saying she was trained to deal with all sorts of things, but even to the extent of being able to randomly adapt bits of previously unknown earth electronic components?)

And so while we have big set pieces and such, and yes there were 'punch in the air' moments, but I didn't really feel like any of them mattered. She just ramps up her abilities to deal with whatever, so... I wasn't bored or anything, but this movie didn't feel like it really had anything to say or do, it was just generic.

Coming back to the female part, was this because Marvel, in an attempt to correct for not having a female lead, swerved into having her be too competent? It didn't feel like her gender mattered at all, so this could have been any person in the role and it would have been just the same. Not that, off the top of my head, I can think of any particularly feminine things that should matter to the plot, but again this is just so generic that why did they bother with this as their female lead movie when nothing else about it stands out?

As said, you've either seen, or made up your mind about this. I'm not saying this is a bad movie, or that this is the downfall of Marvel, and certainly not saying that female lead movie is a bomb, just that... there's nothing particularly noteworthy to this movie aside from that female lead that makes it worth watching.

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