Captain Marvel is a bit of an odd movie. It’s a straight up superhero origin story with a bit more of a cosmic twist than many we’ve seen (other than Guardians of the Galaxy… and Thor…) It’s something of a prequel–in that it’s chronologically set before any of the other Marvel movies other than the beginning of Captain America. It’s got a hero in Captain Marvel with a grab bag of vaguely defined glowy energy powers with memory issues who has to go on a journey and power up to her final form.

Overall, it’s… fine? It’s an origin story and we’ve had those done far better (Iron Man and Captain America in particular). It’s an introduction of a new character, but what do we end up really knowing about Captain Marvel? It fills in some history about Nick Fury, the Tesseract, and the Avengers Initiative… but I’m not sure any of that is something that we actually needed. Leave a little mystery. What’s more, I didn’t really ‘feel’ much in teh way of range or character growth. Once Captain Marvel is powered up… there’s nothing that can hurt her. You can make an interesting Superman character… but they didn’t much do it here.

Stylistically, I grew up in the 90s. There was a lot of nostalgia there, but it felt overdone.

Nick Fury: You know anything about a lady blowing up a Blockbuster? Witnesses say she was dressed for laser tag.

I really did like the brilliant coloring though. It was pretty to look at, at least!

Perhaps one of the best parts of the movie was the introduction of the Skrulls as shape shifters who have been setting themselves up on Earth forever. That has a lot of potential to really shake up the MCU in years to come. I’m worried that they’ll make one of the core heros a Skrull just for the shock value–changing everything we thought we knew about them–but it still has a lot of potential. A thought for another year.

Overall, about the middle of the pack for both the MCU and 2021. Not a bad movie and worth watching for completionist’s sake, but not one I’d watch outside of an MCU rewatch.