After much hype and a curious amount of promotion surrounding a cat, Captain Marvel finally arrived Friday. With it comes the beginning of the end of this era of the Avengers, and so the Ringer staff flocked to theaters (like everyone else) to see it. They came out with thoughts about Brie Larson, questions about Ben Mendelsohn, and declarations to let the ’90s die.
1. What is your tweet-length review of Captain Marvel?
Miles Surrey: Just as everyone expected, the best parts of Captain Marvel were Alien Ben Mendelsohn and a cat.
Andrew Gruttadaro: A decent movie that starts off pretty rough and gets good only when an alien shows up in Louisiana, which is a weird thing to say.
Amanda Dobbins: Sci-fi superhero movies are not my personal bag.
Amelia Wedemeyer: Carol Danvers, you deserved better.
Daniel Chin: For a movie that involved warring alien races, hivemind artificial intelligence, shape-shifters, and a Demogorgon cat, I was surprised that Captain Marvel managed to keep things relatively simple and easy to follow.
Kate Halliwell: The darkest MCU film yet—not because of violence or whatever, but because the theater I went to messed up the projection. What I could see was … fine.
2. What was the best moment of the film?
Herman: I genuinely appreciated that Captain Marvel doesn’t call too much attention to itself as the first female-led movie in the franchise. Partly, this is a smart dodge; playing the girl-power card too blatantly invites questions about why, if this franchise cares so much about female representation, it didn’t get here sooner. But even if it’s for the wrong reasons, Captain Marvel still falls into the show-don’t-tell school of having female characters do cool, important things, an approach I frankly prefer to Wonder Woman’s. Now launch five more female-led franchises so we don’t have to keep having this conversation, please.
Wedemeyer: Anything with Annette Bening! (I also enjoyed the Stan Lee montage in the beginning.)
Chin: The subway fight scene between Captain Marvel and the Skrull. It had already been teased in the trailers, but seeing her actually fight this extremely nimble old lady for several minutes—while horrifying a bunch of commuters—was truly special and absurd.
Halliwell: The montage through Carol’s memory, when she gets back up from a beatdown as a child, teenager, Air Force cadet, etc. … it got me, OK? I have feelings!
Gruttadaro: At the end of the movie, after Carol Danvers has helped the Skrulls ward off the Kree, she and the lead Skrull, Talos (played in full alien makeup by Mendelsohn), return to Louisiana for a celebratory dinner and … for some reason he’s wearing a gray zip-up hoodie? Over, like, alien gear? He just … decided to pop a hoodie on. It’s mind-boggling, and will likely be one of my favorite images from movies in 2019.
Surrey: Take your pick. Nick Fury meeting Goose; Nick Fury cuddling with Goose; Nick Fury adopting Goose; Nick Fury losing his eye after being clawed by Goose; Goose unfurling the giant tentacles hidden inside his cat-alien mouth to swallow a Marvel MacGuffin and take out bad guys. All hail Goose.
Dobbins: I liked it when Mendelsohn got to be funny for like 10 minutes in the middle there. Banter: my favorite part of the MCU since 2008!
3. What was your least favorite part of the movie?
Gruttadaro: The “Come As You Are” drop made me squirm.
Herman: I love when my female action heroes risk death by obstructing their peripheral vision instead of using a damn hair tie!
Dobbins: I’ll be honest: I didn’t need the alien drama.
Chin: Everything with the Supreme Intelligence was a bit too much for me. It was a cool excuse to throw Bening into a few scenes, and I guess anything would’ve been better than the green floating head from the comics, but all those moments were weird and confusing.
Wedemeyer: So, I really wanted to like this film, but I left the theater disappointed. I thought the fight scenes weren’t as exciting or compelling as in other Marvel films, and I was also frustrated with the amount of corny dialogue. Oh, and this applies to the majority of film, but NOT ENOUGH ANNETTE BENING!
Surrey: That Marvel had the gall to get Lee Pace back and slap some more blue paint on his beautiful face to give him only five minutes of screentime. Justice for Joe MacMillan!
Halliwell: I cringed every time someone said “Marr-vell” and practically gave the camera the Jim Halpert look.
4. Grade Brie Larson as Captain Marvel.
Wedemeyer: B+: I think she’s a great actress, but she wasn’t given a lot with that script. She did the best she could with what she had.
Chin: C. I didn’t think Larson was particularly bad, but I also didn’t think she brought very much to the character. Perhaps she was purposefully a bit blank in an attempt to play into her character’s amnesia, but in a movie as wildly absurd as this, you gotta have a little more fun with the role than that.
Herman: She’s at her best when bantering off benevolent father figures like Sam Jackson and Jude Law. Otherwise, the Peter Parker–esque spunk falls flat on its face, though I did start to miss it once Carol’s powers got unlocked and she went full glitter bomb. Her physicality in the hand-to-hand fight scenes was genuinely impressive! More of that, fewer space missiles.
Dobbins: Plucky! Implausibly perfect hair! They don’t give her a lot of room to stretch in this movie, but I enjoyed her stubborn-but-charming ’tude.
Surrey: TBD? I’d like to see how Larson holds up in Avengers: Endgame. She was hindered here spending most of the film as an amnesiac, which might’ve been necessary for the plot but felt like a huge waste of an Oscar winner.
Halliwell: Solid C+; very quirky, very ripped, but otherwise didn’t do it for me. Just take a moment to imagine Emily Blunt in this role—we really could have had it all.
Gruttadaro: B. There were times when she tried to be funny that really didn’t work for me. I was more into the stoic, I’m-socially-strange-because-all-of-my-human-memories-were-erased-after-I-was-abducted-by-aliens version of Carol Danvers. At some point we decided that all Marvel superheroes also have to be comedy stars, and I just don’t agree with that.
5. Who is the low-key MVP of the film?
Chin: Probably more high-key than low-key, but de-aged Samuel L. Jackson’s Agent Fury is my MVP. He was given the most material to work with since making his first MCU appearance in Iron Man’s post-credits scene, and I thought he really grounded the film with an incredibly funny performance. If not him, though, then Monica Rambeau (Akira Akbar), solely for her love of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Wedemeyer: Bening! For whatever reason, I’m an idiot and totally forgot she was in this film, so I was pleasantly surprised when she popped up on screen. Not only did extraterrestrial glow look great on her, but she took over every scene she was in (sorry, Brie).
Halliwell: The CGI team—this was the first Marvel movie where the de-aging effect didn’t look uncanny valley to me at all. Next, let’s work on that wig budget, huh?
Surrey: Mendelsohn, as an alien with an Australian accent with a fondness for milkshakes and hoodies. I would watch an intergalactic adventure comedy led by Talos and Korg from Thor: Ragnarok.
Herman: Physiologically, Mendelsohn can do anything. But it takes skill, practice, and, I’d like to think, some level of talent to make a ridiculous prosthetic goblin into a menacing villain, a sympathetic hero, and effective comic relief.
Dobbins: Mendelsohn gets to be a villain, a diplomat, a hero, a dad, and a comedian in the course of this movie. Good for him.
Gruttadaro: Anyone who doesn’t say Mendelsohn didn’t actually watch the movie.
6. What is your most pressing question about Captain Marvel?
Wedemeyer: Why did this movie have to be two hours?
Chin: I have about 20 pressing questions about the cat alone, so I’ll just ask this: What’s Captain Marvel been doing this entire time? Sure, she said she wanted to help end the Kree-Skrull war or whatever, but she’s been doing that since 1995? Can she time-travel or not? Does she age?
Surrey: If Captain Marvel is set in 1995 and Endgame is somewhere near our present, does that mean it took her more than 20 years to find a suitable home for the Skrulls?
Dobbins: So … she’s undefeatable?
Gruttadaro: Oh, I have SEVERAL questions about Alien Ben Mendelsohn:
- So, Talos has the voice of Mendelsohn, but then Agent Fury’s boss is also played by Mendelsohn?
- So when Talos was impersonating Agent Fury’s boss, did he ever think to himself, “Wow, this body is perfect for my voice”?
- WHY WAS HE DRINKING A MILKSHAKE WHEN HE SHOWED UP IN LOUISIANA?!
- AND WHY DID NO ONE EVEN CALL ATTENTION TO THAT?!
- And again, what made him want to put on a gray zip-up hoodie over his alien clothes? Was he embarrassed about his attire or just warming up to earthbound fashion?
Halliwell: I have a lot of pressing questions, and they all revolve around Larson’s workout routine.
Herman: How is a movie that’s about 60 percent connective tissue between half a dozen other movies supposed to play when it’s watched out of sequence on Disney Plus?
7. What is the best “It’s the ’90s” bit in the movie?
Wedemeyer: CGI Sam Jackson.
Gruttadaro: The CD taking minutes to load was haunting.
Chin: The scene at Maria’s house where everyone is huddled around the computer quietly waiting for the Black Box recording to load. They had a few similar bits about slow technology throughout the film, but the fact that you had the Australian Skrull sitting in the room for this one made the moment.
Herman: [footage not found]
In all seriousness, there’s nothing wrong with just … setting a story in the ’90s without making it about the ’90s. In fact, that’s mostly what Captain Marvel does, making every Garbage needle drop and Blockbuster cameo a distracting intrusion. This movie is already busy enough world-building an entire alien civilization; it doesn’t have to bend over backward to let us know that it knows grunge was a thing too.
Halliwell: A Blockbuster cameo is never not funny.
Surrey: I miss Blockbuster.
8. And now, let’s talk about the cat.
Halliwell: It’s not a cat, it’s a Flerken. Did you even see the movie?
Chin: I was initially very confused and skeptical of Marvel’s marketing decision to create an entire live-stream event for this cat before the film’s release, but now I totally get it. I don’t know what a Flerken is, what its motives are, or why it looks like a common house cat, but now I’m here praying that they make a Fury and Goose buddy-cop movie in Phase 6 of the MCU.
Dobbins: I’m sure the cat is nice, but cat jokes are not a replacement for basic character development and stakes. It’s a no from me.
Gruttadaro: My only thing is this: What if a cat, but instead of a cat, it was a dog?
Wedemeyer: I thought the cat was way overhyped. It was a cat. Sure, it had an octopus thing going on inside its mouth, but so what? I’m sorry, I’m not into those kinds of gimmicks. Can we talk about Bening again? Why doesn’t she have an Oscar?
Herman: My cat, too, would happily gobble up an extremely important object before scratching me in the face. Five points for realism.
Surrey: Is Goose an Avenger? He should be an Avenger. Goose could kick Hawkeye’s ass.
9. Captain Marvel easily tore through an alien spaceship. How is the fight against Thanos in Endgame going to play out?
Herman: We’ve known how Endgame was gonna play out since all the characters with sequels lined up got vaporized. Captain Marvel just adds some (even) more CGI to the mix.
Chin: Based on that scene alone, I feel like Endgame should last maybe 10 minutes before Captain Marvel defeats Thanos. But since the film is rumored to run around three hours, I’m guessing there’ll have to be a little more to it than that.
Halliwell: Since Doctor Strange and a few of the other big guns dissolved in the snap, we needed someone ultrapowerful to reinforce the current squad—no disrespect to Cap and Black Widow, but being able to punch slightly harder than the average human isn’t gonna do it this time. Carol and Thor shooting rays out of their eyes? That we can work with.
Wedemeyer: Hopefully Carol will don her USC Trojans outfit and kick some Thanos butt! Honestly, though, I have no idea, and thank goodness we won’t have to wait a year to find out.
Surrey: The way I see it, Captain Marvel is basically Superman without the kryptonite, and the closest thing her adversaries could do to stop her at the end of the movie was try to engage her in a philosophical debate. Yeah, Thanos is screwed.
Gruttadaro: One will lose and then time travel back to the beginning of the fight. Then the other will lose and time travel back to the beginning of the fight. This will continue on for eternity—it’ll be like two 12-year-olds playing a never-ending game of Madden.
Dobbins: Captain Marvel throws up all the space and time power that she swallowed, and they travel back in time to keep Thanos from snapping? I can’t believe I just typed that sentence.
