A tale of self-discovery and trial-by-fire friendship, 'Captain Marvel' brims with genuine humanity and old-school heroism and is also a nostalgic throwback to those of us who grew up in the 90s.
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Directed by duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, ‘Captain Marvel’ takes place in 1995; before Nick Fury was the Nick Fury, and before the birth of the Avengers Initiative. Brie Larson plays Vers, a member of an elite Kree military unit known as Starforce, led by Yon-Rogg (Jude Law), who is also Vers’ mentor. A technologically advanced civilization alien race, the Krees are at war with another species of aliens known as the Skrulls, whose ability to shapeshift foils the Starforce’s rescue mission and Vers ends up captured by the Skrulls. Unbeknownst to Vers, she holds a secret piece of knowledge in her subconscious. Through the Skrulls’ attempt to extract this knowledge, Vers vaguely learns that she had a past life on Earth.
Escaping capture, Vers ends up on Earth where she meets pre-eyepatch Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), then a young low-level SHIELD bureaucrat who had never met an extraterrestrial being before. The movie then becomes a kind of buddy film, in which Vers teams up with Fury to uncover her past on Earth and the secret knowledge. When Vers finds out the truth of her identity, it sets her on a different path and also imbues her with a new-found sense of self-assurance.
Larson plays her character always with a sense of warmth and levity. Wisely, she doesn’t take all that superhero stuff too seriously. When she busts into a train to catch a Skrull in disguise and her blond hair gets all messy and falls in front of her eyes, she nonchalantly puffs it away (in other movies, hair and all are always in the right place).
The best part of the film are the scenes shared by Larson and Jackson. Having co-starred in two movies before, a palpable sense of chemistry have developed between the two. Jackson, playing a 25-year-younger Fury, gets to drop the no-nonsense, tough-guy persona of older Fury and to inject some jocularity and panache into the role. One of the film’s funniest moments is the revelation of how Fury ended up wearing his trademark black eyepatch.
Admittedly, ‘Captain Marvel’, despite its strong feminist overtones, is not as politically cognizant as ‘Black Panther’ nor are its action sequences as dazzling and inventive. Nevertheless, ‘Captain Marvel’, with its tale of self-discovery and trial-by-fire friendship, brims with genuine humanity and old-school heroism and is also a nostalgic throwback to those of us who grew up in the 90s.
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