tldr: It’s pretty good, but not super-great. Upper-tier Marvel, but I’d put it behind Black Panther, Thoragnarok, Spiderman, Winter Soldier, and probably the first Guardians, at least. But much better than Dr. Strange and Ant-Man + Wasp.

Thoughts:

  1. So that might be the first time I teared up at a studio logo.

  2. So the plot of this movie was really, really complicated, with multiple levels of unreliable narrators and lost memory. I think that was to its disservice at first, when it had to establish a whole shit-ton of Kree stuff while also laying groundwork that no, things are not what you’re being told, this doesn’t quite add up. It works in the end, but it’s a slow start.

  3. So also doing that, this is the most open inversion of the comics in making the Skrulls a group of sympathetic refugees rather than Bad Guys. Even well into the movie, I was still waiting for the twist to come and the Skrulls to be evil after all.

  4. The digital de-aging thing was medium-uncanny. I thought Samuel L. Jackson worked okay — he didn’t quite look right, but he looked right enough for me not to fuss about it; but Clark Gregg was srs wtf. Partly this is because I’ve seen Samuel L. Jackson continuously since the ’90s, whereas Clark Gregg, up until like 2008 I had only seen him in Sports Night (repeatedly), and so in my head, he’s always Quo Vadimus Guy. So to see him in the ‘90s and supposed to be that age but looking nothing like that was too weird.

  5. TBH, I thought they leaned too heavily on the “lol 90s!!!!” jokes, but guy next to me strongly disagreed.

  6. They also went way heavy on the grrl power stuff, which I thought worked fine, but Jess thought was heavy-handed at certain times (like when they played “Just a Girl” over a fight scene, which is admittedly a lot on-the-nose).

  7. Also though the part where Young Carol gets back up after all her fall-downs reminded me a super-lot of the Buffy scene where a bunch of Slayers are created.

  8. My Monica Rambeau theory: She was intended to just be a kind of easter egg, but in this post-Black Panther world (and esp if this movie also does well), they’d be idiots if they don’t make a… uh, “Photon” I guess, movie.

  9. Thing I really like: How hardcore powerful they made Cap’n Marvel once she broke out of her Kree conditioning. Like, they weren’t fucking around, she’s just a straight-up demigod at that point.