Just watched this a while ago so here is my thought process.
Pros:
- I liked that captain marvel was more lively in this movie. I think brie is a great actress and some people really overhates her due to her past comments on white male which were taken out of context.
- Kamala was heart of the movie. She is one of the only rare parts of the movie I really liked.
Cons:
- The movie's editing is so badly chopped up that it was just jarring in so many places. It feels like everything was rushed to piece together to form a movie which lacks cohesiveness, depth and just didn't give these characters enough room to breath. It feels like it was always trying to quickly reach from Point A to Point B, skipping over the underlying details and characters felt more like mannequin. It just didn't feel like it was meant to be watchable and for audience to connect to.
- The writing and pacing of this movie suffers a lot due to shorter given length and plot holes. You had a chance of showing kamala acknowledge and take it as a lesson that her idol hero is not perfect in any way which was shown in first scene on kree planet destruction but it was never followed up. Her meeting captain marvel was really underwhelming, although I loved her reaction and it's still funniest scene of the movie but it felt like they just quickly whipped it up to move to next sequence.
- The main villain of this movie, Dar Benn's acting made me physically cringe. It took me more than half of the movie's runtime to properly understand her character's motivation but they could've given us a lot of time showing things from her perspective, how their people suffered due to lack of water and sun resources. The internal emotional conflicts could've played a lot of role and would've humanized carol too, showing that she never wanted this in first place but this was shrinked to one scene only when the marvels are landed on brown planet after dancing planet scene. The villain's death had no emotional moment either, just quickly skipped over to monica's loss.
Conclusion:
I think the main issue with MCU right now is that they've forgotten what used to make them millions of dollars in box office. It wasn't cool action sequences and it wasn't quips or jokes. It were the characters that audience used to relate to in their day to day lives. People could feel and relate what these people were going through, what drives a villain to do things in the first place, what choice a hero has to take as an opportunity cost when being put in a tough situation. There used to be scenes we used to laugh, shed a tear or just feel the sense of joy which we want to go back and watch over again and again. Now it feels like people who are making these movies have gone directionless, just chumping out non-sense content and seeing what sticks. Not every movie has to have world-ending stakes and not every movie has to watch after it's runtime. You can't expect to launch movies like this and have people sit over anticipating what could be coming next. I'm pretty sure this movie could've been amazing if the writing and editing wasn't subpar and it could've also used more characters like Bruce Banner and Shang Chi (looking at you shang chi post credit scene). Length could've been expanded to 2.5 Hr to let characters enough room to breath, less jarring sequences, more time to have plot cook. Villain's motivation could've been further explored.