Oh, I don't have any very deep thoughts! But I felt like it was structured a lot more like something like The Last Starfighter or even the first Star Wars movie than your average superhero origin story, although of course those are often only about two steps away from a superhero movie.
But, sort of the way Cap 2 Was structured more like a war movie. And maybe it's that a big part of the superhero origin movie is traditionally, oh no I have these vast powers, how do I use them? How do I use them responsibly? And that's really not what Carol's journey is in the movie - the Yon-Rogg scenes at the beginning set it up to be that, but it very quickly comes clear that Yon-Rogg has done a pretty bad job at convincing Carol to doubt what she can do, and she's spending pretty much the rest of the movie confidently using her powers to the best of her ability and never really doubting that she should.
I think it's also maybe how the fight scenes are structured? Which again comes back at least partly to Carol being just that great! But even in her two one-on-one fights with Yon-Rogg, it's never really structured as being about her proving herself against a tough opponent; it's about her getting a job done. (Actually, the closest we get to this is her mental standoff with the SI, but even then, it never really feels structured like a one-on-one battle with a powerful supervillain; it feels a heck of a lot more like the climax of the Wrinkle In Time movie.) So we don't ever really get the big climactic supervillain fight I've come to expect in these movies; even the final fight scene is never really structured as being about defeating the bad guys.
Which is also related to how the stakes in Captain Marvel were never exactly the kind of stakes you expect in a superhero movie, which I've actually seen called out as a problem in wrong reviews that are wrong - actually there's a traditional structural advice for comics writers that you have to continually increase the scale of the threats, and in Captain Marvel it sort of felt like the threats were continually decreasing in scale - we started with trying to keep an evil empire from getting a weapon which could destroy the galaxy and ended with trying to save some kids we'd never met before, which did not drop the intensity at all because the stakes got more personal as they got smaller, which was actually really cool.
I'd say the Thor movies (at least 1 and 3. We were just discussing after watching CM that none of us can remember any of the plot of 2...) do actually feel more like superhero movies than this one? Because they do have that ongoing character line of with-great-power-comes-great-responsibility and so on.
GOTG is a little different because it was a team movie from the beginning (and 'team superhero movie' is not something there's been as many to compare to), and it was definitely going for the Space Adventure vibe specifically, so you could definitely read it as less of a superhero movie too. But even within that, it still sort of had those themes around learning to work for the greater good, and around the structure of the final fight, and the increasing stakes? And GOTG2 (which I've only seen once, so I might be misremembering) actually felt even more super-hero-y, with the focus on Peter and his daddy issues.
(There was a Dark Phoenix trailer before Captain Marvel, and I actually found it really interesting to compare the two, because both of them basically have the plot of "woman has her mind messed with because of her vast cosmic powers" and yet Dark Phoenix is all about how dangerous Jean is and Captain Marvel is all about how awesome Carol is. Some of that is that CM was deliberately subverting all the tired misogynistic tropes in the Dark Phoenix plot, and you can totally still be a superhero movie while subverting that, but you gotta wonder what they were thinking sticking that trailer on this movie.)
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But, sort of the way Cap 2 Was structured more like a war movie. And maybe it's that a big part of the superhero origin movie is traditionally, oh no I have these vast powers, how do I use them? How do I use them responsibly? And that's really not what Carol's journey is in the movie - the Yon-Rogg scenes at the beginning set it up to be that, but it very quickly comes clear that Yon-Rogg has done a pretty bad job at convincing Carol to doubt what she can do, and she's spending pretty much the rest of the movie confidently using her powers to the best of her ability and never really doubting that she should.
I think it's also maybe how the fight scenes are structured? Which again comes back at least partly to Carol being just that great! But even in her two one-on-one fights with Yon-Rogg, it's never really structured as being about her proving herself against a tough opponent; it's about her getting a job done. (Actually, the closest we get to this is her mental standoff with the SI, but even then, it never really feels structured like a one-on-one battle with a powerful supervillain; it feels a heck of a lot more like the climax of the Wrinkle In Time movie.) So we don't ever really get the big climactic supervillain fight I've come to expect in these movies; even the final fight scene is never really structured as being about defeating the bad guys.
Which is also related to how the stakes in Captain Marvel were never exactly the kind of stakes you expect in a superhero movie, which I've actually seen called out as a problem in wrong reviews that are wrong - actually there's a traditional structural advice for comics writers that you have to continually increase the scale of the threats, and in Captain Marvel it sort of felt like the threats were continually decreasing in scale - we started with trying to keep an evil empire from getting a weapon which could destroy the galaxy and ended with trying to save some kids we'd never met before, which did not drop the intensity at all because the stakes got more personal as they got smaller, which was actually really cool.
I'd say the Thor movies (at least 1 and 3. We were just discussing after watching CM that none of us can remember any of the plot of 2...) do actually feel more like superhero movies than this one? Because they do have that ongoing character line of with-great-power-comes-great-responsibility and so on.
GOTG is a little different because it was a team movie from the beginning (and 'team superhero movie' is not something there's been as many to compare to), and it was definitely going for the Space Adventure vibe specifically, so you could definitely read it as less of a superhero movie too. But even within that, it still sort of had those themes around learning to work for the greater good, and around the structure of the final fight, and the increasing stakes? And GOTG2 (which I've only seen once, so I might be misremembering) actually felt even more super-hero-y, with the focus on Peter and his daddy issues.
(There was a Dark Phoenix trailer before Captain Marvel, and I actually found it really interesting to compare the two, because both of them basically have the plot of "woman has her mind messed with because of her vast cosmic powers" and yet Dark Phoenix is all about how dangerous Jean is and Captain Marvel is all about how awesome Carol is. Some of that is that CM was deliberately subverting all the tired misogynistic tropes in the Dark Phoenix plot, and you can totally still be a superhero movie while subverting that, but you gotta wonder what they were thinking sticking that trailer on this movie.)