The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

Having something to prove can be good for you because you try to live up to the challenge, but when it’s too much, it can all come crashing down. Captain Marvel had so much to live up to: being the first Marvel heroine film, delivering the amount of action that fans want, and paving the way for the new Avengers film. It was all too much.

Captain Marvel follows Vers (Brie Larson), an amnesiac with extraordinary power, as she enlists to become part of the Kree warriors and goes on her first mission. She gets captured and questioned by the Skrulls, the trolls that the Kree are fighting. Vers lands on planet C-53 in her attempt to escape, and there she realises that her previous life has more secrets than she thought.

The plot is not too innovative with the whole remembering your past and figure out who you are bit, but not cliché enough to have you dismiss the entire film.

The filmmakers jump right into the action with little to no characterisation on the main character in the early scenes, and when they do give the audience some background, it is a short montage of all the times through her life when she was knocked down.

If that was meant to have audiences sympathise with her, then it is important to say that viewers need much more than that to identify with a character and actually care about what happens to them. If the characterisation was meant to come through the action scenes, then it was a decision to sacrifice the audience caring about the character. The result is that the audience barely cares about Vers, whether she lives or dies, and even her whole journey of self-discovery.

Captain Marvel does set a feminist girl power tone in the obvious fact that the main solo character is a female heroine, as well as the little details like Vers stealing a dude’s bike because he kept asking her to smile for him.

That is an important theme in the film; however, it is not enough to have audiences appreciate the heroine just because she is a woman, which negates the very message of feminism and girl power.

For the acting, Brie Larson was able to hold up the badass vibe and did very well in the action scenes, but when it came to the emotion-evoking scenes, she majorly lacked. That could have been an issue because of the limited opportunities Larson had to convey her character’s emotions as well as her performance. Samuel L. Jackson plays S.H.I.E.L.D agent Nick Fury and is seriously one of the few reasons that this film is even watchable. Regardless of Jackson’s well-known charisma, he adds humour to the film, and that gives it some of the very little life it has. Jude Law plays Vers’ Kree mentor, and his performance is mediocre at best. Some would argue that it is a miscast.

You will probably see the film for the connection to the new Avengers film or because you are a Marvel fan, but that does not mean that you should just nod along to the issues in the film.