We saw Captain Marvel and It's Going to Make All the Dudebros Cry

...which is just fine by me. I've seen several good reviews of this movie but none so concise as this, which I think originated on Polygon:

Captain America gets back up again because it's the right thing to do. Captain Marvel gets back up again because fuck you.

Another reviewer pointed out that this is a movie about female power, which is subtly different from empowerment. Carol Danvers always has power - she's just trying to figure out how much and how to use it. 4/5 stars as a competent and enjoyable Marvel film filling in important origin information.

The movie does several things very well; for example, I can't think of another mother-daughter superhero film in the modern canon. It allows both Captain Marvel to have her origin told and to give us, somewhat subtly, Nick Fury's MCU origin story. That's a credit to the writing and directing of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.

A lot of electrons have been spilled over Brie Larson's acting, many of which I think miss the point. Larson is playing a character who is amnesiac, unsure of herself, but at the same time brash and cocky. When you critique Larson for inconsistent acting you miss the reality that she's bringing to life. Vers, her Kree name and persona when we meet her, is a person unsure of herself in an unsure situation. The transition from Vers to Captain Marvel (a name that's never actually spoken in the movie) requires that Vers recapture her past Carol Danvers self in order to create the foundation for who she will become. I wouldn't put Larson in the "A" acting class, yet, but I think she shows herself more than capable at her craft.

If there's a weakness to this it's that the script has too much action. Perhaps that's deliberate, but the pacing of the film sees Vers yanked from one emotional and physical challenge to the next. That alone could keep someone off balance, sure, but it also doesn't give us viewers time to become closer to the character. For much of the film that doesn't matter, but when Danvers is interacting with Lashana Lynch's Maria Rambeau I think the film would've benefited from a slower pace, especially as an origin story.

To the rescue comes Monica Rambeau (Akira Akbar). Other than Spider Man we haven't seen many children in MCU movies so I was intensely interested in how they'd handle this. I can't say much because it'd be spoilers, but Akbar's dialog and performance provide much-needed cement for the scenes she's in.

In conclusion I urge everyone who has any interest in the current genre of superhero movies to see this, if only to drive up its revenue numbers and make more dudebros cry. We've been desperately short on female-centered MCU stories and this one is a good example of what can be done with these characters.

We saw Alita: Battle Angel and It's Mostly About the SFX

Alita: Battle Angel is a western adaptation of a popular manga. As such, it's already treading on some very thin ice. Previous attempts to westernize manga have ... not gone well. This one avoids many of the bad pitfalls but ends up not being entirely satisfying. 3/5 stars for basic competence and yes I'd probably watch a sequel if one gets made.

Alita is a SFX tour-de-force, portraying a world of mixed machine/human bodies from grotesque prostheses up through full-on cyborgs. At some level you know it's animation and effects, and the film doesn't try to hide that. Instead, it wants to keep your attention with a combination of action and novelty, wrapped tightly around a self-discovery story.

Rosa Salazar plays Alita through a dizzying set of changes. One scene she's a disobedient fourteen-year-old girl; the next, she's a teen discovering a potentially mutual attraction with another teen. Not long after that, she's a fighting machine and then ultimately she goes (effectively overnight) from 14-15 to young woman. She's figuring out who she is, who her friends and enemies are, and how she will shape her place in the decaying decadent world she inhabits.

Given that it's manga you need to keep both hands firmly suspending your disbelief because... really? I mean... really? OK, no spoilers, but there's just a huge handful of things that make no sense even if you accept the movie's premises and context. Getting past that would be helped if more of the supporting cast were given better dialog. It almost feels like screenwriters James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis forget characters are in scenes at times. This is particularly painful in early scenes where Alita and Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) are talking. In the room is also Nurse Gerhad but she remains silent throughout the scenes. Idara Victor is reduced to nodding, waving, and looking concerned in places where you'd expect a normal person to have something to say. I was actually surprised when her character did speak; I half-believed she was intentionally mute.

Of the supporting cast, the only one I really liked was Vector, which is likely due in part to Luke Cage having turned me into a Mahershala Ali fan. Walz does a competent job but the problem is that he's initially set up to be the father figure of the naive Alita; the film doesn't seem to know what to do with him once she attains (effective) womanhood.

The film's other big problem is its unsatisfactory ending. In a manga, you expect the end of a story (volume) to be just a chapter in a long-running saga. Translating that onto film requires something more and this script falls short, I think. See this for the cool effects and snappy action and let's hope Rosa Salazar gets to shine more.