Captain Marvel was pretty much what you would expect from an action film in 2019. The movie takes place in the 1990s, and the main character, Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel, somehow has amazing powers at the beginning of the film.

Since she lives in a space colony of an elite race called the Kree, she believes they were bestowed to her by some other super powerful entity. The powers are inexplicably strong, but Carol has to learn to control them. Then, later in the film, she learns that the only one inhibiting her was herself and unlocked the full potential of her powers in an instant, which I found quite unrealistic. However, the origin of her powers, which was shown later in the film, turned out to be quite cool.

*Spoiler warning ahead*  

A former scientist who worked for the Air Force launched a mission with Danvers, which went awry. The woman, Doctor Minerva, bleeds blue, revealing her Kree heritage. Then Mar-vell, or Yon-Rogg, comes in and kills her, but not before he tells Carol to shoot the engine of their craft, which houses the Tesseract. A huge explosion ensues and ends up giving Carol her amazing powers, but she loses all of her memories.

Carol was originally a human, and still is one, but is taken to the Kree planet and given a blood transfusion to make her believe that she is of Kree heritage. Yon-Rogg devised this plan because he thought that if he didn’t take her in, she could become a great threat to the Kree operations. Throughout the movie, Carol has flashbacks that reveal bits and pieces of her past to her. When she finally meets an old Air Force buddy of hers and sees her daughter and a picture of them all together is when she realizes Earth is her true home.

The final act has a battle between the Kree, who are trying to capture the Earth and exterminate an alien race called the Skrulls, against Captain Marvel. To find out who wins in this epic battle, check out the movie.

*Spoiler Ended*

One part of this movie that I–and probably lots of other fans of the Marvel franchise–enjoyed were the appearances from Nick Fury and Phil Coulson in the film, which is a nod to previous films in the MCU including the Captain America and Avengers series’. This movie occurs chronologically before any others in the MCU other than Captain America: The First Avenger, so we meet a young Nick Fury, who was a highlight of the film. Being played by Samuel L. Jackson, the character likes to banter, and he trades one-liners with Carol Danvers throughout the movie. The problem with this is that it shows us how much he carries her character, and how little substance there is to it. There is no emotional connection created between the audience and Carol, which means that we’re only supporting her because the movie says she’s the protagonist.

I would recommend the movie mainly only to those who avidly follow either the MCU or the Marvel comic book franchise, as the film is a bit confusing as it is, and without context, it would be even more so. I thought the movie was quite basic, as it followed quite a simple arc of a protagonist being double-crossed and unlocking her powers at the last moment to save the day. Critically, the film did just a bit better than average, but it was nothing to scoff at. IMDb gave it a fair score of 7.2, and the Tomatometer put it at 78%, which seems about right for this movie. At the box office, it generated just shy of 457 million USD.