We begin with a lovely tribute to Stan Lee. The movie then starts with an explosion and never lets up. Out of the wreckage emerges a woman. She has lost her memory except for strange quick flashbacks that don’t quite make sense to her. She accepts what she is told by her mentor and trainer, that she is a Kree warrior named Vers, yet something nags at her.  Who is she really?

The Kree, incidentally, were the bad guys in Guardians of the Galaxy.  Here in this movie, Vers trains constantly as a warrior. She is such a good fighter that she is sent on a secret mission to retrieve a spy who has been captured by the enemy.  The Skrulls are shapeshifters and hated by the Kree.

Of course things go wrong and Vers ends up crashing through a Blockbuster on earth in 1995.  This is a set up for a lot of jokes and a nostalgic look back at the technology of the time.

  About now, things get really, really complicated. Vers meets Nick Fury.  Here he is played by a young Samuel Jackson who still has both his eyes.  The deaging of him works wonderfully.  We also meet a cat named Goose who, of course, is not really a cat but something much more strange and alien.

  Does this sound complicated? This is a ride and it’s just getting started. Vers finds out who she really is and that she has powers given to her by the explosion because it involved the tesseract. She has absorbed the power of the tesseract. She meets friends important to her from her past of six years ago, Annette Bening, Lashana Lynch and her daughter Akira Akbar. I’m not giving their names in the movie in order to not give away the twist.

Did I say twist?  There’s a multitude of twists along with many more battles.

  And then Vers truly discovers her powers and becomes Captain Marvel. She actually has a wonderful time playing with her energy beams, soaring through the skies and taking on and defeating her enemies – now that she knows who her enemies are.

She becomes so powerful, you feel she could beat up Thanos with one hand tied behind her back. Of course, Thanos isn’t in this movie but we all know that Captain Marvel will be in Avengers:Endgame. The last Avengers ended with Nick Fury sending a desperate message to her as Thanos triumphantly turns half the galaxy to dust.

So Captain Marvel is an origin story, setting us up for the battle to come. But it’s a fun adventure in itself.  Brie Larson is a fine Captain Marvel. The one big flaw in the movie is that it is confusing for the first half since we only know what she knows and what she knows doesn’t make sense to her.

Definitely see this before you see Avengers: End Game.

  Reviewed by Marian Powell

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