What a way to squander talent. Annette Benning, Jude Law, Ben Mendelsohn, etc. From 20th Century Women, The Young Pope, etc. to this. Same directors did Mississippi Grind and Half Nelson. And yet the best character and performance was a guy I've never heard of wearing 10 lbs of makeup on his face (the main green guy, whose name they never adequately conveyed to me, or maybe I was just too uncaring to remember it). The raving about how great the cat was is sad commentary on something.

Why did it have to be set in the 90s? That resulted in a key character's face being CGI the entire movie (while paired with a body that clearly has the paunch, flexibility, and speed of a 70-yr old man) and incessant and annoying winks about blockbuster, radio shack, nirvana, etc.

Unintentionally dovetailing with the 90s setting is the fact it feels like it was made in the 90s — and not in a good way. The sparring scene at the beginning felt like a worse version of the same scenes in The Matrix, Equilibrium, etc., but without the tactility. The scenes set on alien worlds felt cut straight from an episode of Star Trek Next Generation or whatever the 90s show was. Even the aliens' faces. When your plot is driven by a "Kree" and "Skrull" conflict of unknown origin or significance, you better have some good writing and acting to carry the movie — and it certainly didn't. When your movie relies on flashbacks to generate emotional connection, you have a problem (see also: Arrival).

Larson's performance has to be the most misguided I've seen since Eddie Redmayne in Jupiter Ascending — but his was at least interesting and unpredictable. The script did her no favors and who knows what the direction was, but her character was bad. All smug and snark and nothing redeeming. Like she was trying to be RDJ's Tony Stark, but without the wit or self-doubt. Just bad. Did they tell her to cock her head and smirk in every scene? LOL at the scene where she casually uses her best friend's daughter to convince her friend to go most likely die in space. Credit to them for not including a needlessly shoehorned in love interest, though. That worked well in Wonder Woman, but Marvel has yet to crack the code of romantic chemistry. The last scene was kind of cool, but somewhere Michael Bay laughed at the size of explosions the bad guys' missiles made.

As far as female-centered action movies go, this was nonsense light years behind Aliens, Kill Bill, Crouching Tiger, Wonder Woman, etc. Larson's acting was about on par with that in Chocolate and Haywire, but without the physicality to compensate. Again, maybe not all her fault, but this thing was not good. Thought Marvel's QC was better than this.

Everyone involved in the making of The Right Stuff should be offended by the references this one made to that.