Make Mine Captain Marvel! (SPOILERS)

[john]

1 hour ago, Bastard of Boston said:

To me, the entire movie was about the Kree manipulating Carol in their attempts to turn her into a weapon. At the end of the movie, she suddenly realized that the confines she was operating within were a complete fabrication of the Kree. They tried to convince her she should be afraid of herself. She leveled up when she embraced the idea that maybe she wasn't just being lied to about her past -- she was being lied to about her potential.

OK, that’s well put.  I agree that thematically it’s about overcoming adversity and embracing full potential, I’m just not sure they showed that in the scenes where she was overcoming her block by mentally walking into some sort of force bolt from the Supreme Intelligence.  Shouldn’t it be more about choosing to disregard restrictions rather than overpowering them with the strength of your mind? Like if she had just plucked off that neck gizmo at any point rather than burning it off when she broke her power free.

Although yes, the flashbacks and the interactions with Yonn Rogg were better at showing that aspect.

[john]

29 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

I've been thinking more about the movie, and I'd say Fury was maybe a bit too goofy here. I've seen people wondering online what/where is the transition between this Fury and the Avengers Fury, but I'm wondering about the story Alexander Pierce told Steve Rogers in Winter Soldier, about when Fury stormed an embassy against orders to save hostages. Not really sure this Fury jives with that. There was also a photo shown in that scene between Rogers and Pierce, and Fury looked older, still with two eyes, than in this movie. So a bit of a retcon, I'd say.

There does seem a bit of a contrast.  It’s not just his goofiness, it’s his feels for alien refugees and his casualness with Coulson about where the Tesseract got to.  Then by Avengers he’s attempting to exploit it for the benefit of humanity.  It is like 15-20 years later. He could’ve seen some shit in that time.

[Bastard of Boston]

1 hour ago, HokieStone said:

I'm trying to think through the timeline of the Tesseract.  At some point it was hidden on Earth (in the Scandanavian church where Red Skull finds it in Captain America 1).  At the end of Cap 1, it ends up in the North Atlantic, right?  I don't remember how it got from there and then into SHIELD possession.  And then at some point...Mar-Vell gets hold of it, and then it ends up on Fury's desk.  I did see something online that the Project Pegasus referred to in this movie was a call-back to the SHIELD base in Avengers 1, which had "Project Pegasus" signs up.  I'd forgotten that.

If we're going by real MCU time, Captain Marvel is the second time we see the Tesseract. The first time the Tesseract is discovered is in Cap 1, when Red Skull tracks it down. At the end of Cap 1, the Tesseract burns through the plane and falls into the sea, where Howard Stark recovers it. One can assume that's how Mar-Vell got hold of it, as it was in government/SHIELD custody -- apparently, there may have been some covert stuff going on, as I imagine they couldn't have been cool with Mar-Vell keeping the cube on her secret spaceship. She used it to start Project Pegasus. Cube finds its way back into government custody via Goose, Fury uses cube to create super weapons in Avengers 1. Loki steals cube, but it's later recovered and stored on Asgard, where Loki steals it back and relinquishes it to Thanos in Infinity War.

[Bastard of Boston]

54 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

I've been thinking more about the movie, and I'd say Fury was maybe a bit too goofy here. I've seen people wondering online what/where is the transition between this Fury and the Avengers Fury, but I'm wondering about the story Alexander Pierce told Steve Rogers in Winter Soldier, about when Fury stormed an embassy against orders to save hostages. Not really sure this Fury jives with that. There was also a photo shown in that scene between Rogers and Pierce, and Fury looked older, still with two eyes, than in this movie. So a bit of a retcon, I'd say.

Maybe he opted to try out the glass eye for a bit before giving up on it? 

[Bastard of Boston]

53 minutes ago, john said:

OK, that’s well put.  I agree that thematically it’s about overcoming adversity and embracing full potential, I’m just not sure they showed that in the scenes where she was overcoming her block by mentally walking into some sort of force bolt from the Supreme Intelligence.  Shouldn’t it be more about choosing to disregard restrictions rather than overpowering them with the strength of your mind? Like if she had just plucked off that neck gizmo at any point rather than burning it off when she broke her power free.

Although yes, the flashbacks and the interactions with Yonn Rogg were better at showing that aspect.

Thanks, I think I like the movie more and more the more I consider it. I think the movie is subtle, which for me, completely unravels the early claims against it that it would be overtly "girl power."

I think that Supreme Intelligence scene at the end, when they were trying to brainwash Carol again, was a bluff on the SI's part. It's mind over matter. That force bolt didn't work on Carol because Carol realized it was a bluff. If Carol believed the SI, then the force bolt would've knocked her back, IMO. In the real world, because Carol was calling SI's bluff, Carol was able to break all her restraints and unleash.

But yeah, that neck gizmo was only a problem for Carol because she believed it to be a problem. She spent the whole movie being minimized by the Kree. Ultimately, the Kree were scared shitless of Carol and constantly made her feel like a liability because, if she believed it, then they'd be able to control her.

Also, the idea that they could take her power away. They constantly threatened Carol by telling her that her power was given by the Kree and it could be taken away. Ultimately, this movie was Carol discovering that her power was her own and couldn't be taken away.

[The Mother of The Others]

The kree "really did a number on her," says ben's scrull, and the kree were the ones benefitting from the amnesia, and the sumpreme intelligence had a memory pool showing carol's memories of childhood, so they did it.    And they wanted carol very skilled, so they left her Earth skills intact, like operating heavy machinery, and just painted over her memories.  So when it was time to fly, she knew the knobs and levers but didn't know why she knew.  That's my explanation.

[A True Kaniggit]

3 hours ago, HokieStone said:

One thing I really disliked is how he lost his eye.  I don't understand why the cat scratched him...and when it happened, it didn't seem like a big deal.  You'd think if it was that bad a scratch, Fury would have been a bit more pain.

Goose scratched him because Fury was getting all up in his face.

And even though the scratch itself wasn't bad, I'm assuming the space cat had poisonous claws or some such that ruined the eye.

 

The after the credits scene was different than I was expecting. I thought they were going to show her on some distant planet still hanging out with the Skrulls, then her getting a message from Fury while half the Skrulls around her disappeared.

[The Anti-Targ]

7 hours ago, sifth said:

Yea, but then it's the movies job to tell me this, like it wisely did when it explained how she understands our langue. 

I mean, there's no suggestion anywhere that she forgot how to speak English. She did grow up on Earth and only spent 6 years with the Kree. Screwing with her memories ain't going to make her forget English. The only thing the Kree needed to do was make sure they implanted fluency in Kree on her brain. I would have preferred it if she realised at some point that her universal translator was busted from her Blockbuster fall the whole time, and that she was reading, speaking and hearing natively. Indeed that could have been a very good holy shit! confirmatory moment for her.

Her jacking the phone to make a galactic communicator shows that she's a tech wizard and not just a soldier.

As for the rest of it. I think the one thing that did stump her, which worked comedically for me and was appropriate, was the keyboard. She left Earth just around the time when typing competency was becoming a necessary skill for everyone, so her not being competent with typing on a Qwerty keyboard is a reasonable thing. And the internet cafe cafe scene correctly showed her struggling with the lowest tech part of a computer. I thought her ability to interact with any tech was fine without having to explain it given the trope that people who have no memory of their past can still instinctively do stuff they didn't know they could do (Alita, Bourne).

4 hours ago, john said:

 Ultimately, I don’t like the idea that great will unlocks unlimited power, that’s more Green Lantern than Captain Marvel.

I don't understand why that's a criticism here.  I would argue it's not even willpower in this case. But in any case, will power is almost always a key component in overcoming any major challenge. And her (will)power didn't unlock anything really, in that there was no intrinsic block on her power. It was an external device blocking her, and she was able to muster enough power to remove the block. So it was an unblocking not an unlocking.

[red snow]

I actually enjoyed the film a lot more than I expected. A large part of that is due to them actually doing a really good job of keeping the plot under wraps. The most pleasant surprise was the use of the skrulls - that was a really neat twist. I mean having Mendelsohn not playing a villain is very clever. He was excellent by the way - really hope we see him appear somewhere else in the MCU. They also made it seem like Ronan the accuser would play a bigger role in the initial casting etc The only part of the film that was predictable was Jude Law being a villain and Carol's memories being messed with/manipulated and the cat not being what he seemed - although they made excellent use of the cat for gags. I really want to see Drax cuddling the cat for some odd reason.

I think I also like how this was possibly the closest to Winter soldier in terms of being low stakes and having an espionage/thriller film for a huge chunk of the film.

I don't really get the criticism some reviewers have had regarding Brie Larson. She actually came off as a unique Marvel character who wasn't constantly making witty comments. I do think there was something missing with her relationship with Rambeau (although I like how they are setting the daughter up for present day films) though. It just felt a bit "there" without there really being any establishment of the relationship. There were several moments where I wonder whether the film-makers backed out of having them be married? It would have actually filled a lot of the blanks for me. That said it was refreshing not to have a film with a love interest in it! That's probably as novel to a marvel film as having a female lead - although I guess Civil war avoided that (it was more about the end of the Cap/stark bromance).

I also thought the scene where we saw Carol Danvers get back up all those times she failed spine-tingling effective. It was great they let the symbolism do the talking as I feel a "we humans keep trying/get back up" would have diminished the scene. That's a great message for everyone - not just girls looking for positive role models and I think it sets her up as a hero.

The ropey aspects were mainly regarding story logic. Why was the light speed drive important to anyone when all the races clearly have FTL drives? The skrull obviously just wanted to find his family but it's beyond me why Dr Lawson was working on it and why the kree had such an issue with it. Unless I'm just being stupid and the FTL was just a pretense/lie Captain Marvel was told and everyone else was simply interested in the skrulls? And then there's the tesseract - I need to find a timeline for where it was and when from the end of Cap1. I was also left wondering how Captain Marvel could be a match for Thanos when her power comes from one of the infinity stones when Thanos now has all of them? My logic at the moment is that she actually has most of the tesseract's power in her meaning Thanos only received a fraction of it. If this is the case it might also make her key to fixing things as she is part of the infinity gauntlet in a way. Guess we'll know in 6 weeks. 

[The Anti-Targ]

3 hours ago, Mosi Mynn said:

I loved that he kept his Aussie accent when he was in Skrullface - very cool.

I wonder what the correct accent should be for aliens. I would have liked the idea, for Skrulls, that the accent they have in their natural state is the one from the first person they copy, because technically that's how they learn the local language right? So that surfer chick should have had an Aussie accent.

[HokieStone]

4 minutes ago, red snow said:

That said it was refreshing not to have a film with a love interest in it! That's probably as novel to a marvel film as having a female lead - although I guess Civil war avoided that (it was more about the end of the Cap/stark bromance).

The ropey aspects were mainly regarding story logic. Why was the light speed drive important to anyone when all the races clearly have FTL drives?

Well, in Civil War, Cap did kiss Sharon Carter.  Not long after the funeral of his true love, Peggy.  Sharon's aunt.  Not that that was weird or anything.  Which, by the way, how was Peggy her aunt?  I'm older than Sharon Carter, and my grandparents were the WWII generation.  I also wonder that a little bit about Tony and Howard Stark - a middle aged guy in 2019 shouldn't have a father that fought in WWII.  I guess Howard maybe fathered him later in life?  But I digress...

I also wondered about the whole FTL drive thing.  But the Kree hexagon jumping thing seemed limited.  When Jude Law and gang first said they were coming to get her, they said something like "we'll reach the nearest jump point in 22 hours".  Presumably the FTL drive can just "jump" from anywhere....

[red snow]

5 hours ago, john said:

Ultimately, I don’t like the idea that great will unlocks unlimited power, that’s more Green Lantern than Captain Marvel.

 

It's not like the willpower is the only thing making her appear like a Green Lantern.

Air force pilot? Check.

Received powers due to an alien spaceship crash? Check

Part of an intergalactic alien law enforcement/army? Check

Powers associated with willpower? I'd actually say that was more debateable. Yes she had to use her willpower to break that dampener thing on her neck but now that's done and her powers are unlocked I think she just has awesome powers. She doesn't need to will it into being.

As an aside it was slight sad to see "shazam" being advertised before "Captain Marvel". Marvel has won that legal rights battle. Shazam looks ok - I'm all for DC doing something a bit more fun/goofy and the fights between Shazam and Sivana have potential

[red snow]

1 minute ago, HokieStone said:

Well, in Civil War, Cap did kiss Sharon Carter.  Not long after the funeral of his true love, Peggy.  Sharon's aunt.  Not that that was weird or anything.  Which, by the way, how was Peggy her aunt?  I'm older than Sharon Carter, and my grandparents were the WWII generation.  I also wonder that a little bit about Tony and Howard Stark - a middle aged guy in 2019 shouldn't have a father that fought in WWII.  I guess Howard maybe fathered him later in life?  But I digress...

I also wondered about the whole FTL drive thing.  But the Kree hexagon jumping thing seemed limited.  When Jude Law and gang first said they were coming to get her, they said something like "we'll reach the nearest jump point in 22 hours".  Presumably the FTL drive can just "jump" from anywhere....

It seems like the MCU has a bit of the comics ever stretching timeline eg Punisher used to be a Vietnam war vet but is now an Afghanistan war vet.

They should have called it the "shit load faster than light" drive in that case (or the mycelium network drive ) as the Kree seemed to be able to commute fairly fast. Maybe the SLFTL drive tech gets shared over the course of 25 years as the GOTG never seem to have much trouble getting from AtoB

[The Anti-Targ]

1 hour ago, A True Kaniggit said:

The after the credits scene was different than I was expecting. I thought they were going to show her on some distant planet still hanging out with the Skrulls, then her getting a message from Fury while half the Skrulls around her disappeared.

Hopefully that's still a scene in Endgame. Probably won't be though. It would be a nice little jab at those who decided to skip Captain Marvel because it had too many lady parts in it. Yeah, she's hanging with the Skrulls. Confused? Ya shoulda seen Captain Marvel.

 

20 minutes ago, red snow said:

And then there's the tesseract - I need to find a timeline for where it was and when from the end of Cap1. I was also left wondering how Captain Marvel could be a match for Thanos when her power comes from one of the infinity stones when Thanos now has all of them? My logic at the moment is that she actually has most of the tesseract's power in her meaning Thanos only received a fraction of it. If this is the case it might also make her key to fixing things as she is part of the infinity gauntlet in a way. Guess we'll know in 6 weeks. 

The Timeline for the Tesseract is OK. Howard Stark retrieves it soon after it drops into the Atlantic ocean. It's not too far fetched to see Stark hand it over for a joint SHIELD/NASA project headed up by an apparently human scientist who is at least as brilliant as Howard Stark. That she squirreled it away to her space station suggests a laxness of security at that facility that should have seen heads roll. But other than that, Mar Vel having the Tessaract for a time does not seem like a plot hole, now that it's back in SHIELD hands by the end of the movie.

Carol is intimately infused with the power of the Space Stone. But I can see Captain Marvel trying and failing to beat Thanos by herself, because her power is not enough compared to the Infinity Gauntlet. So she needs the whole team. But what was more powerful than the whole gauntlet was Stormbreaker. Thanos tried to blast it out of the sky, and yet it still embedded itself in Thanos' chest.

And something imbued with the power of one of the infinity stones probably means that particular infinity stone either has no effect, or is beneficial to the person. Which means Thanos possibly can't bring the full force of the Infinity gantlet to bear on Captain Marvel. A weapon made from the space stone shot at Captain Marvel probably gives her a power boost, like Thor's lightening did to the Iron Man suit.

Actually, just wondering if Captain Marvel is bullet proof. She can obviously survive falls travelling at terminal velocity. But blunt force trauma isn't the same as piercing trauma. If someone aims for her brain, is she as vulnerable as Thanos? That would at least go some way towards mitigating her suffering from the Super Man problem.

[williamjm]

I thought it was a good film, although perhaps not one of the very best MCU films. A lot of MCU films have had problems with their endings being slightly dull CGI battles and it did happen again here, which might be the biggest flaw. I did worry a bit in advance that they were showing too much in the trailers, but it turns out there were some surprises that they kept well hidden. I liked the twist with the Skrulls actually being the good guys, it does seem very plausible that a race who could shapeshift would attract a lot of paranoia from other races regardless of whether they deserved it or not. I don't think it necessarily stops other Skrulls being villains in a future film, there may be other factions out there less friendly than Telos and his gang, and given how much they're been persecuted it would be easy to do a plot where some of them feel they need to be in control to really be safe (a bit like the Dominion in DS9).

I thought Brie Larson put in a good performance, nothing exceptional but I think comparable to other MCU heroes. The supporting cast was also good, Jackson in particular seemed to be having fun with the role. Goose stole every scene he was in.

1 hour ago, HokieStone said:

Well, in Civil War, Cap did kiss Sharon Carter.  Not long after the funeral of his true love, Peggy.  Sharon's aunt.  Not that that was weird or anything.  Which, by the way, how was Peggy her aunt?  I'm older than Sharon Carter, and my grandparents were the WWII generation.  I also wonder that a little bit about Tony and Howard Stark - a middle aged guy in 2019 shouldn't have a father that fought in WWII.  I guess Howard maybe fathered him later in life?  But I digress...

The gap between generations is longer than average, but not unheard of. I had a great uncle who fought in World War 1 and his youngest niece was born in the 50s, which is probably a roughly similar age gap to what would be required for Sharon to be Peggy's niece.

6 hours ago, sifth said:

You know, I just noticed something, there is a small, but silly plot hole in this film and it's the fact that they called SHIELD..........well SHIELD.

It was a running gag in the first Iron Man film that they needed a shorter name for the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.

I don't think it's a new plot hole, this isn't the first time in the MCU that it's shown the SHIELD name has been around for a lot longer than Coulsen suggests in Iron Man 1.

[john]

1 hour ago, The Anti-Targ said:

I don't understand why that's a criticism here.  I would argue it's not even willpower in this case. But in any case, will power is almost always a key component in overcoming any major challenge. And her (will)power didn't unlock anything really, in that there was no intrinsic block on her power. It was an external device blocking her, and she was able to muster enough power to remove the block. So it was an unblocking not an unlocking.

I don’t have a problem with will power as a trope, and I guess it did play a part. But when she overcame the block it seemed like more of a chosen one type moment than anything else they did.  Danvers is someone who fights for what she’s entitled to and doesn’t give up even when she fails. But in the end she just overcomes thanks to the extent of her intrinsic power.  Maybe that’s not what they were going for but it seemed a bit off message to me.  It would’ve worked better if they’d had the power up scene after she defied Yonn Rogg, then the one thing would’ve led to the other and her power up moment would’ve been triggered by a realisation, rather than by her just straining real hard.

1 hour ago, red snow said:

It's not like the willpower is the only thing making her appear like a Green Lantern.

Air force pilot? Check.

Received powers due to an alien spaceship crash? Check

Part of an intergalactic alien law enforcement/army? Check

Powers associated with willpower? I'd actually say that was more debateable. Yes she had to use her willpower to break that dampener thing on her neck but now that's done and her powers are unlocked I think she just has awesome powers. She doesn't need to will it into being.

The whole origin scene is very reminiscent of Hal Jordan.  They even made her a test pilot like he was. The only difference is she decides to destroy the source of power so it can’t be misused unlike Hal Jordan who cheerfully accepts unlimited power when it apparently chooses him.

I was sad we didn’t get to see Danvers in dogfights or anything.  I guess they needed her in the research project for the plot but it would’ve been cool if she had realised her dream about flying fighter jets.  Even if it’s true they didn’t have women flying in the 90s in real life, they could’ve just stuck it in, it’s not like it’s the most realistic of cinematic universes.

[Werthead]

Quote

The ropey aspects were mainly regarding story logic. Why was the light speed drive important to anyone when all the races clearly have FTL drives?

FTL in the MCU appears to be limited. You have to use jump points, you can't just zip from wherever to wherever, and you have to map out the jump point network and travel between them (like, say, stops on the underground), which is time-consuming and inefficient. You also can't jump sequentially: if you do more than a dozen jumps or so in succession, your brain starts to go weird (remember Rocket and the guys in GotG Vol 2?), so you need downtime between jump sequences. The whole thing is a massive pain in the backside.

The Kree superdrive seems to be much more like a souped-up version of warp drive: you point at your destination and just go in a straight line towards it, incredibly fast. No brain-melting, no laborious mapping out of network nodes, no need to find a pre-existing jump point before jumping etc.

The Bifrost is a direct-line artificial wormhole from point to the point. Sling rings and the magic portals that the sorcerers use also seem to be a similar kind of thing, but are much more energy-intensive and, in the case of the portals, more limited in range.

[sifth]

53 minutes ago, williamjm said:

I don't think it's a new plot hole, this isn't the first time in the MCU that it's shown the SHIELD name has been around for a lot longer than Coulsen suggests in Iron Man 1.

Really? When was it stated before this?

Was it on Agents of Shield? I'm not the biggest fan of that show so I only watch it from time to time.

[The Anti-Targ]

28 minutes ago, john said:

I don’t have a problem with will power as a trope, and I guess it did play a part. But when she overcame the block it seemed like more of a chosen one type moment than anything else they did.  Danvers is someone who fights for what she’s entitled to and doesn’t give up even when she fails. But in the end she just overcomes thanks to the extent of her intrinsic power.  Maybe that’s not what they were going for but it seemed a bit off message to me.  It would’ve worked better if they’d had the power up scene after she defied Yonn Rogg, then the one thing would’ve led to the other and her power up moment would’ve been triggered by a realisation, rather than by her just straining real hard.

The whole origin scene is very reminiscent of Hal Jordan.  They even made her a test pilot like he was. The only difference is she decides to destroy the source of power so it can’t be misused unlike Hal Jordan who cheerfully accepts unlimited power when it apparently chooses him.

I was sad we didn’t get to see Danvers in dogfights or anything.  I guess they needed her in the research project for the plot but it would’ve been cool if she had realised her dream about flying fighter jets.  Even if it’s true they didn’t have women flying in the 90s in real life, they could’ve just stuck it in, it’s not like it’s the most realistic of cinematic universes.

Huh, I didn't get that vibe at all. Seemed to me she came to the realisation that the Kree have been holding her back the whole time, and she wasn't going to allow it any more.

I don't get the Hal Jordan thing. The fundamental thing is that Carol got her powers in an explosion, by accident. Hal got given a ring, purposefully given to him. If Carol is like Hal, then Hal is like Frodo Baggins. The Green Lanterns are a galactic police force with no allegiance to any civilization. Star Force is the Kree equivalent of the Navy Seals. Any other similarities are merely incidental and insignificant. 

Another thought: if the current origin story in the comics is that Carol Danvers is half Kree and that is part of the movie back story, could that mean Mar Vel from the movie is her mother? The superficial age difference is right. The question is whether Mar Vel came to Earth that long ago, and why she would give her kid up?

[Darth Richard II]

3 minutes ago, sifth said:

Really? When was it stated before this?

Was it on Agents of Shield? I'm not the biggest fan of that show so I only watch it from time to time.

It's in one of the One Shots. Agent Carter founds it in the late 40s.