In Defense of Captain Marvel: Is Brie Larson Really as Bad as People Say?

My wife and I have been spending this Thanksgiving weekend rewatching the entire Infinity Saga in chronological order, starting with Captain America: The First Avenger and eventually planning to end it with Avengers: Endgame. A pretty clever way to spend the weekend together, if I do say so myself. This has recently allowed me to rewatch and reanalyze Captain Marvel as a film away from all the internet chaos and shouting matches among fans and detractors. As the title suggests, I will defend Brie Larson, who does not give as bad a performance as her detractors would like people to believe.

The common complaints about Larson's Carol Danvers is, mostly, the usual Mary Sue accusations. In my last post, I took on those accusations Regarding Daisy Ridley's portrayal of Rey in The Force Awakens. You can read about that here. I'll be doing much the same here for Brie Larson's performance as Carol Danvers.

Now that that's out of the way, roll post.

The most common complaint Larson gets regarding her performance as Carol Danvers in this movie is that her acting is wooden and unemotional. After having watched the movie and with it still fresh in my mind, I can present several examples that prove this point to be objectively false. Larson could have given a much better performance than she does, but she does not deserve the amount of hate she gets for this movie. Here are a few examples proving that point:

1. Introduced to us as Vers of the Kree Star Force, we first meet Carol as she spars with her mentor on the Imperial Throne World of the Kree. All throughout that scene, Danvers's mentor, Yon Rogg, is instructing her on how to suppress and control her emotions so they don't become a hinderance to her in the heat of battle. We also notice a small device on Danvers's neck that supposedly assists her in keeping her emotions in check. We later learn that this is not the case. From these two points of data we can extrapolate that Danvers is sounding unemotional on purpose, as he is doing her best to follow the advice of her mentor, which any devoted student would do.

2. Larson does, in fact, emote several times throughout the film. It mostly occurs during the action scenes and some might easily miss it, but it is there. I distinctly recall Larson showing visible anger several times within the film, at least as early as her escape from Skrull custody after being captured. Look at the video below for visual evidence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJmZszahVrA

As a final note on Larson's emoting, she at one point get so visibly angry (somewhere during the climax of the film) that a single tear is seen trickling down her cheek. I"m not sure if the tear was genuine or CGI rendered, but it looked real enough to me. 

No, Brie Larson's acting isn't as bad as people believe it to be. Could she have done better? Yes. Was it the worst acting I've ever seen? No. That would have to go towards the kids in the live action Dumbo movie.