Captain Marvel storms to $455m opening weekend

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/03/11/captain-marvel-storms-to-455m.html

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Maybe nobody cares about what Rotten Tomatoes says?

I mean, other than the movie makers who seem obsessed with RT or those who like indulging in snark?

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Damn social justice warriors-

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What? They didn’t obey BigDog1999 and his demand that Captain Marvel conform more to his fantasies? Why is my freedom of speech being censored? Why are my kind being oppressed?

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“Captain Marvel storms to $455m opening weekend”.

As well it should, it’s excellent! The missus and I sprung for that fancy IMAX showing technology, and I was really impressed with how they spun out the characters (and putting a bit more complexity into Nick Fury) and made Carol Danvers a relatable, human hero.

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Here’s the thing with RT…taking away the posts/comments and just looking at the scores…they are usually fairly accurate.

Now it is only opening weekend, so it needs to be in theaters a bit longer for the score to level off (could go higher or lower). But generally if you get a room of 10 people together who have a reasonably diverse set of movie tastes, you’ll find the score for RT represents that small ample relatively well.

80% for Captain Marvel is perfectly fine. I think its a 9/10 myself. I only hold 2 of the Marvel films at 10/10 (Iron Man I and CA: The Winter Soldier). The marvel flicks I think are better than CM are Spiderman Homecoming, Black Panther, and Doctor Strange and GotG 1 are on the par with this.

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It is as satisfying as Grealish scoring the winning goal after getting punched by a coward:

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It’s a Marvel movie. It’s going to do well. Personally, it was middling. The support characters were usually more interesting, which is unfortunate. The movie is nowhere near the level of Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse or Black Panther. But it does beat some Marvel movies like Thor 2.

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There’s no issue with Rotten Tomatoes Critic Scores. The problem is their audience scores. The ones where anyone can write a negative (or positive) review of something they haven’t seen. Up until very recently you could manipulate that score months ahead of release.

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Agreed. I personally ignore those because to your point…they can be too easily manipulated. Not sure why anyone would actually give a damn to look at those.

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We saw it, and loved it.

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My wife booked our tickets for opening weekend well in advance, that’s how excited she was. I don’t usually go to blockbuster movies the first weekend because I hate the crowd, but now that you can reserve seats in advance, it’s far better, so I was game.

The movie absolutely blew us both away. Far from being wooden and stiff, Brie Larson showed a wider range of emotions and the ability to convey them through subtleties of expression than any other of the fine actors in the MCU. And I saw that having been particularly impressed with Hemsworth in Infinity Wars and how well he conveyed Thor’s pain. The relationships were lovingly done, and there was enough humor to leaven the emotional impact of her trauma without blunting its force. I only might have wished for a few more scenes of her childhood and youth to keep building on that theme of “when they knock me down, I get back up,” but I think my hand would have been far too heavy in pounding that theme home. They did it far deftly enough.

My wife talked about the dialogue, which was particularly tight. And I saw this as another chance for Marvel studios to prove they can do not only super hero films, and political spy films (Winter Soldier remains my favorite MCU film), and comedies, but now they can do introspective dramas, too. I expect End Game to wrap up phase III in spectacular fashion, but this film gave it one last massive jolt to propel the whole thing sky high.

Carol Danvers is an amazing character, and Captain Marvel an incredible hero. When the MCU finally comes to an end someday, we’ll still have this really remarkable, cool, diverse, exciting collection of films to look back on. For an old comics fan like me, these are the best of days.

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Good flick! Very faithful, I felt, to the “cosmic” vibe of the character.

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It’s good to cross-reference RT’s scores with other review/rating-aggregation sites: Metacritic, Letterboxd, IMDB, etc. Every Friday, I use at least three of those metrics on each new release to help guide my film plans. If you know ahead of time that reviews are borked, like for CM, you just take that into account when evaluating.

As a middle-aged female who has seen way too many ‘kick ass, but in a sexy way’ women superheroes, here’s what I liked best:
When her hair should have been messy and tangled (on an airfield, after flying at high speed), it was messy and tangled, and it was shoulder-length as you’d expect for a pilot, not a massive cloud of perfectly coiffed fluff.
The friendship with her fellow pilot was wonderful, as was her de-facto mentorship of her friends’ child.
The ‘Indiana Jones’ moment when her former Kree superior tried to manipulate her into fighting on his terms. “I have nothing to prove to you” is my favorite line in the entire MCU.

I don’t know that I have the ability to judge how good the movie is on it’s own - I was too busy enjoying the trees to see the whole forest.

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EDIT: Faithful to the cosmic vibe…very true.

Not faithful to the origin, It took some serious liberties and definitely retconned/changed plenty.

I did love the movie, I think it’s fantastic and I quite enjoy most of the things they changed. Makes things so much simpler and easier to understand and such.

But it was not faithful to Captain Marvels or Mar-vell’s origins, nor the comic versions of the Kree vs Skrulls.

But I said “faithful to the ‘cosmic’ vibe.” Which it very definitely was.

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I don’t really care about the plethora of superhero movies, nowadays, but I took my daughters out to see it, just to troll the trolls. A few buck well spent and a good feeling it was.

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Print comics start new versions of characters frequently. Movies are just doing the same.

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