A good analysis of why
Captain Marvel (2019) doesn't work as well as I wanted it to. It uses
Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) for contrast, because they have so many story beats in common. (The portion of this video showing the two films literally side-by-side is kind of interesting to watch, all by itself.) It shows one reason why flashbacks are such a risky story-telling device, why "show, don't tell" is a story-telling axiom, and how the order in which you tell your story matters. The reviewer proposes fixing the movie's central problem simply by reordering the existing scenes into their chronological sequence. You wouldn't need re-shoots or the insertion of deleted scenes, as you so often get in a "director's cut" which is almost inevitably longer than the theatrical release. His proposal to "fix" the movie makes it sound simpler, but that's not always a bad thing. Goes to show that, as with flashbacks, doing something clever - telling the story out of sequence - isn't necessarily better and can actually undermine the story and/or character.
Now that I'm thinking about it,
Captain Marvel also illustrates the pitfall of another storytelling trope, the main character with amnesia. I'd be interested to see a comparison of
Captain Marvel with
The Bourne Identity, where I feel like we got to know Jason Bourne much better than Carol Danvers, while still having plenty of compelling action and a plot-heavy story. This video uses another superhero movie,
Robocop (1987), as an example of an amnesiac main character who is introduced to the audience before the event that causes his amnesia, so we kind of know him even when he doesn't know himself.
This commentary also revealed something to me about why I didn't like the film. When I saw it, I felt the main character was just really flat and dull, and I chalked it up to Brie Larson's performance. I just thought she was wooden. I think this was the first thing I'd ever seen her in, and I wondered what all the fuss was about, she didn't seem all that great to me. But this reviewer puts the onus on the writing and the editing (and thus, the director). I always have a hard time separating the writing from the performance. I guess it's ironic that the directors of
Captain Marvel were supposed to bring their experience in character-driven stories to an action- and plot-driven franchise (my other critique of this movie is that the action scenes were dull) but stumbled in the crucial task of building the central character.
p.s. If you feel like cutting Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck some slack, we have no idea what role the studio or Kevin Feige played in the production of
Captain Marvel. Sometimes a movie's producers stick their noses where they don't belong, with disastrous results. Marvel-Disney doesn't have a reputation for that, but otoh, we know that Edgar Wright left
Ant-Man right before production was supposed to start, and Ava Duvernay politely declined the offer of a Marvel movie after meeting with the studio execs, and in both cases it was because of what Marvel wanted from the story - "creative differences" (and in Duvernay's case, we know it wasn't because of Disney, because she did
A Wrinkle in Time, and it wasn't because it was a superhero movie, because she's doing
The New Gods for Warner Bros).
). 
