[Direckshun]

Well, I've seen the flick, and everything I heard in advance was wrong.

Spoiler!

I thought it was a pretty good movie. I didn't think the plotting was "Standard Marvel." There was no other Marvel film that charted this plot. I was reasonably surprised at a couple of turns, and honestly I thought the writing was pretty solid.

Building up Carol's backstory was rushed, but after she crash lands on earth, the film largely doesn't care about establishing her character as much and it gets better for it. I thought the film was well crafted: the flashbacks were handled well, and the flip with the Skrulls being refugees was really solid.

The acting was just fantastic with one major exception. Samuel L. Jackson is just a phenomenal actor, as has been said a million times, and he runs circles around Brie Larson all film.

Larson, I thought, was just not great. She's a phenomenal actor, and her performance in "Room" was one of the best I've ever seen. But maybe Larson is miscast here -- she looks like Danvers, but Larson's powerhouse acting comes from the neck up. There's a scene late in the movie where she figures out her true origins while talking to the Skrulls, and it's all emoting and realizing, and she kills that scene. Every other scene, however....

I don't know. I think Marvel asks a lot of whole-body physicality in their acting. The example I keep coming back to is Chris Pratt, who is a constant full-body ball of energy. Larson isn't that. She is an astounding actress from the neck up, but her acting below the neck is -- I'm totally comfortable saying it -- wooden. She was fine in the fight scenes, but I think Marvel needs their MCU heroes to jump off the screen a bit more than Larson did. Maybe she'll evolve as the MCU goes forward.

I'd probably put this in the 3rd tier of MCU films, rating it as "pretty good." That tier includes Captain America 1 and Doctor Strange -- which, of course, were also character-introduction movies.

Good film, had a ton of fun watching it, I think Larson is a bit miscast in the role.