Captain Marvel

Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck made Half Nelson (2006), a small film about a teacher with a drug habit and a pupil who finds out. Handed the first Marvel film built around a woman, they have done the sensible thing and made a small film anyway, for as long as they were allowed to. For an hour in the middle Captain Marvel is two people in a car, a diner and a records room in 1995, working out who one of them is, and that hour is good. The half hour before it and the half hour after it are not.

It begins on Hala, the Kree capital, where a soldier called Vers (Brie Larson) wakes from a dream she cannot place and goes to spar with her commander Yon-Rogg (Jude Law), who tells her to control her emotions. Ben Davis shoots the planet in the franchise’s standard blue-grey, and Andy Nicholson’s sets are corridors and a training floor that could belong to any of a dozen films. Editors Debbie Berman and Elliot Graham cut her buried memories as flashes, a cockpit, a bar, a woman’s face, and the flashes are so brief and so alike that for twenty minutes we could not tell what we were meant to be piecing together. Then a mission against the shape-shifting Skrulls goes wrong, Vers is captured, escapes, and falls through the roof of a video shop in Los Angeles.

That is when the film wakes up. Samuel L. Jackson, digitally shaved of a quarter of a century, plays Nick Fury as a man who has not yet seen anything strange and is enjoying the novelty. Larson plays Vers dry rather than warm: she asks questions the way a police officer does, and she does not smile until she has decided to. Together they make a proper two-hander, and the film’s best joke belongs to it, on a commuter train, when Vers spots a Skrull disguised as an elderly woman and hits her before anyone can object. We laughed out loud, and so did the rest of the cinema, and it is the last time the film is that quick.

Ben Mendelsohn is the other pleasure. His Talos is a green, lizard-faced alien with an Australian accent and the manner of a middle manager who has had a long week, and Mendelsohn plays the make-up rather than fighting it. Lashana Lynch, as the pilot Maria Rambeau, has one scene at a Louisiana kitchen table in which she tells a woman who she used to be, and Larson does her best listening of the film opposite her. The Kree, by contrast, are wasted. Annette Bening is on hand mostly to be mysterious, Gemma Chan gets a rifle and two lines, and Djimon Hounsou and Lee Pace appear because they were in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and have to be somewhere.

Then the film goes back into space and becomes what it had spent an hour avoiding. Sanja Milkovic Hays’s red-and-blue suit arrives, and it is a good suit; the rest is ships, beams and a woman glowing at things while Pinar Toprak’s brass swells to tell us it is a big moment. We checked the running time twice in the last twenty minutes. There is one exception, a short passage about a girl getting up off the ground that we will not describe, and it moved us more than the rest of the film had prepared us to be moved. It lasts a minute. The fireworks resume.

Five writers share the story credit, Nicole Perlman and Meg LeFauve alongside Boden, Fleck and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, and it shows. The Kree-Skrull war, the memory mystery and the 1995 buddy picture take turns rather than adding up. Perlman’s Guardians of the Galaxy got away with the same clutter by being cheerful and in a hurry; this is more solemn about its identity plot, and an identity plot needs to be either clear or quick, and this is neither.

Watch it at home, where the light show is smaller and the talk lands better. It runs 124 minutes and carries a 12A. Yon-Rogg spends the film telling Vers to keep her feelings in check, and the film’s reply is a hero who is allowed to smirk. We would have liked to see what Larson could do if it had let her feel a little more.