Captain Marvel

Captain Marvel thoughts -- Don't read if you don't want spoilers: We saw it Sunday and for the most part I liked it, but it's that "for the most part" that has been bugging me as I've tried to figure why I just couldn't fully buy it. It was a good movie but not a great one. Brie Larson seems to be a popular target for criticism but while the movie had its flaws I really don't think Brie was one of them. Rather the parts of the movie that trouble me were directorial and editing related resulting in a movie that came across as surprisingly disjointed. It didn't feel like a consistent whole, it literally felt like a bunch of individual scenes stitched together with not much concern for whether those scenes flowed naturally. 1) It sometimes came off more "Men In Black" than MCU. Goose -- tentacles -- a cat sized thing able to swallow entire groups of full-sized people: I'm looking at you! Goose's abilities make perfect sense if you know him/her from the comics, but no context is given in the movie at all except "it's a Flerken" so he ends up coming across cute but dangerous in a silly way, more in keeping with Men In Black. 2) Unless I missed it, Goose is never explained at all. He's just there. Which would be fine if this was Guardians of the Galaxy with aliens plenty, but it's 90's Earth. And even after Goose's secret is out nobody seems concerned with the next most basic questions - "Why is there a Flerken on Earth?", "Are there more of them?", "What other aliens are here?" Given that Fury (SHIELD) is discovering the existence of aliens on Earth for the first time this complete lack of concern played out on screen even a little is out of character. 3) People in the film often didn't seem to care much about their own world, and it's hard for me to buy the sense of danger or concern for the people in the movie when the people in that world don't seem to much care about it either. a) Fury crashes into a bus and comes to a stop for example, just seconds later that entire bus is gone and Fury is in the street alone more like he had hit a light pole than a bus full of people, or at least a driver. b) Carol beats up an "old woman" on the train and though there are some minor comical bystander reactions the scene as a whole looks flat and staged. 4) Character reactions aren't believable: a) When Fury loses his eye, his reaction is so casual that I was sure at the time that the movie was still teasing us in build-up to how he would actually lose his eye. b) Fury and Carol are taken to a waiting room, ominously discover they are locked in, and then they get out. And that's it. After that Fury and Carol just walk openly around the base hallways without any apparent sense of urgency or needing to hide from anyone, adopt a cat, and then openly blast a locked security door open to get to a records room. There's no display of stealth or fear of being discovered by the base personnel that locked them up in the first place. Oh yeah, but then some Agents of SHIELD show up. c) Just before her breakout moment of realization, she's secured and forced to commune with the Supreme AI of Hala. As she breaks free she begins to glow, and power up, and meanwhile her captors of the elite Starforce just stand there agape ready to get beaten up like they're minions in an old Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris movie. This elite force of people see her power buildup and defiance coming... and just stand there dope-faced and snarling. Again, I generally liked the movie and I'll probably see it again for fun, but so far as recent MCU movies go the character development, storytelling, and overall movie-making here fell far short of what I have come to expect from MCU films. I don't blame the actors at all, I squarely think the directors and producers dropped the ball -- I don't know if they got lazy, apathetic, both, or something else. I don't know, but the movie ultimately was just "meh", and it could've been so much more.