Captain Marvel

By the time we meet Carol Danvers, decades of this saga have already happened somewhere else, off-screen, on the other side of a war Earth never knew it was adjacent to. That's the whole point of watching this second: it recontextualizes everything after — an organization has been quietly watching this planet for years before anyone here ever put on a suit.

The film itself is a rescue mission wearing a blockbuster's clothes: a woman spends the whole runtime being told, gently and not so gently, what she's allowed to feel and how much power she's allowed to use, and the plot's actual climax is her deciding those instructions were never really about her safety. It's also, unapologetically, a hangout movie about a fighter pilot and her best friend, dropped into a nineties strip mall with a photon deck stuck in a Radio Shack — light on its feet in exactly the moments the stakes could have made it grim.

Watched here, first in the timeline but for a story that starts with someone already fully formed, it reads less like an origin and more like a long-overdue correction to one.