Marvel’s superhero adventure veers from boomingly serious to quirkily droll as Larson wages a vicious war against evil aliens

This latest tale from the Marvel cinematic universe takes us way back in time, many years before the great catastrophe shown in Avengers: Infinity War. We have crash-landed in mid-90s America: a hilariously antediluvian world of Blockbuster video stores, dial-up internet, web searches via AltaVista, and grindingly slow CD-Rom drives. At one important stage, there’s a soundtrack outing for Nirvana: “Come as you are, as you were / As I want you to be / As a friend, as a friend / As a known enemy ...”

This is an engaging and sometimes engagingly odd superhero action movie from directors and co-writers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, a weirdly nonlinear mashup of past and present, memories and present experience, Earth and non-Earth action. It’s an unconventional origin-myth story, which makes it initially uncertain what the nature of those origins is, and maybe even whose origins exactly we’re talking about. There’s an eccentric splurge of tonal registers from boomingly serious to quirkily droll. It gives us a playful first glimpse of a number of things, important and otherwise, including how Shield agent Nick Fury acquired a notable part of his badass image – Fury played of course by Samuel L Jackson, his face digitally regressed to the way it looked around the time of Pulp Fiction. A lovable cat makes an important appearance.