Captain Marvel - Spoilers

Captain Marvel II begins with a Skrull world under attack by the Kree Empire, with Ronan the Accuser (alongside Korath the Pursuer and Att-Lass, this last one being one of Yon-Rogg's henchman who survived) in charge of a massive Accuser fleet bombarding the planet. All seems lost until, out of a sudden, Captain Marvel comes flying in from outer space with "Only Happy when it rains" in the background. We have our first laser party of Carol vs basically the entire Kree fleet of Accusers (some 50 ships opposed to the 4 of last film). It is a extremely tough fight, but Marvel wins. After this defeat, Ronan retreats enraged to the Kree Throneworld. His companion Att-Lass is very remorseful and sad for the loss of Kree life in this war against Marvel, but Ronan tells him him off.

Marvel goes down to the Skrull world and people effectively worship her, using her star symbol and praising "Marvel!" (mispronouncing Marvell). Carol maintains her stance of proud warrior but the audience and Talos can tell she's more wounded than she seems and is hiding to save face can all Marvel. They have a meeting with Skrull Queen Annelle, with Anelle concluding it is time to strike the throneworld and end the war in a decisive stroke. Talos thinks it is unwise to let Marvel to off alone to war, but Annelle doesn't see why they'd risk Skrull lives when Carol is effectively a goddess who just took on an entire Kree fleet and came out (seemingly) unscathed. After that, Carol and Talos have a chat alone, where Talos points out her martyrdom won't help anybody and that his people must also fight for themselves, and during it we see that Carol's practically one-woman-war against the entire Kree war machine has left her battered physically and mentally. Carol states this is her way of atoning for the blood in her hands from her years as a Kree (a statement Talos counter-argues to no avail) and that if she shows any weakness the Skrull people will lose hope. Neither Talos nor Carol change their minds.

Meanwhile, Ronan is on his way to the throneworld. Att-Lass tries to convince him that they have to sue for peace with the Skrulls, too many Kree are dying, arguing that only a being like Carol can beat her and this is something they do not have. This gives Ronan a epiphany. He tells off Att-Lass for being a coward but thanks him for the idea. In the throneworld, there's the Kree War Council with essentially the entire high command of the Kree War Machine, including Yon-Rogg.

In the council we learn Marvel has become a beacon of hope and the entire Kree Empire is essentially falling apart as rebellions keep popping inspired by Marvel's sign of hope. The attack we witnessed in the opening was essentially the High Command's last shot. The Supreme Intelligence calls everybody imbeciles and threatens to execute Ronan for his failure, but Ronan tells the story of how, in times past, the Supreme Intelligence had a physical form among the Kree as their god and that it could do that again. The Intelligence is intrigued but the High Command points out that this would require the Intelligence to suddenly and brutally consume a ridiculous amount of Krees so power this process, and it is unstable and liable to backfire. The Intelligence merely thanks Ronan, and as the High Command recoils in "wait hang on" the Intelligence starts consuming everybody's body and mind. The last one the Intelligence absorbs is Yon-Rogg, who dies screaming "VEEEEERS!" as he is consumed. The Supreme Intelligence has now assumed a almighty physical form, standing among the empty husks of the entire Kree war command. The Intelligence now looks like a eldritchtified Jude Law, its chosen form. Para tal, ela toma a forma de Yon-Rogg (O Jude Law), que morre gritando pela ajuda de Veers. Ronan and a terrified Att-Lass swear their loyalty to it, and The Intelligence accepts it, telling Ronan to round up the entire remaining members of the Kree high hierarchy so they can be consumed and absorbed. The Intelligence runs through Yon-Rogg's memories and finds Maria and Monica Rambeau, smiling. Before Ronan leaves, the Intelligence gives him one more mission.

Thus we have a montage of the Supreme Intelligece announcing itself to the Kree while Ronan stopping by on Earth to capture the Rambeaus. The Intelligence basically gives his New Era Speech and says that many of them now have the privilege of being "chosen" by the Intelligence (for consumption). The Intelligence's forces start rounding up people, with Att-Lass looking on in a very conflicted manner. The Kree appear happy for the Intelligence in physical form, but don't seem too good on the whole "chosen for human sacrifice" bit. With the Rambeaus in his grasp, the Intelligence makes Ronan send a message to Carol she's going to execute them for the whole galaxy to see unless Carol shows up. Carol goes in overdrive of rage and decides to go by herself, despite Talos pointing out his Skrull spies have been silent as of recently and he suspects something has gone down, but she goes anyway, with the support of Queen Annelle.

Supreme Intelligence keeps absorbing people to power itself, until it decides that he is going to consume Maria Rambeau, to get a emotional edge up against Carol. A random Kree scientist points out this is a terrible idea because the Intelligence has never absorbed human DNA and the process could lead to unintended side-effects, like Maria not being as much absorbed as added to the Intelligence's DNA. The Intelligence absorbs him and goes to absorb Maria. Psychic battle between Maria and Intelligence briefly ensues as the Intelligence absorbs her.

Carol arrives in the Kree throneworld, tearing through the Kree defenses and find the Intelligence, who now looks like a eldritchtified Maria Rambeau. Intelligence vs Carol ensues, but Carol is clearly off-guard from seeing her best friend's face fighting against her and the Intelligence's parisitic powers means she can just absorb everything Carol throws at her, getting stronger while Carol gets weaker. Carol is defeated and captured. The Intelligence shows the entire galaxy how weak Carol is, Darkest Hour ensues. Att-Lass doesn't seem pleased by this turn of events. Talos and the Skrull Queen watch in horror, Skrulls are devastated. The Intelligence announces Carol will have her role to play, as she will be absorbed s well. Carol is thrown into jail and we have Monica and Carol interacting in this hour of darkness, with some bonding and Carol coming to the aesop of the movie of "even as powerful as I am I still have limits and can't carry the world on my shoulders".

Meanwhile, in the Skrull world, the Skrulls are completely hopeless and being attacked by Ronan the Accuser and his host. While they Hold the Line, Talos tells them of how Carol helped them so much, they need to help back. No one quite buys until Talos tells of how she wasn't as invincible as she seemed and was hiding her wounds to protect the Skrulls. They are moved enough to decide to go on a suicide mission to save her.

It is time for Carol to be absorbed by the Intelligence in a public square. Before being absorbed, she is given the chance to do a final speech and Carol gives a Rousing Speech about hope and unity, of the lives lost in the war and that could be gained by ending it. The crowd watching it seems moved (and are a bit terrified of the Intelligence after the whole "mass sacrifice" thing), as well as Att-Lass. As she is about to be absorbed, the Skrulls arrive in Big Damn Heroes fashion (probably after having infiltrated the Kree ranks somehow) and free Carol. Marvel vs Supreme Intelligence ensues in the Kree atmosphere/skyline. Down below, the Skrull rescuers fight a losing battle against the Kree until Att-Lass, moved by Carol's story and speech, switches sides and fights alongside Talos against the Kree. The crowd joins Att-Lass and the situation becomes a general melee between the Kree crowd, Att-Lass and his forces and Talos and his Skrulls versus Ronan and the Intelligence loyalists while Carol and the Intelligence rumble in the stars above.

Again, Carol is frustrated by fighting a being that absorbs her energy and looks like her best friend/love interest, and we head into the old "I know you're in there somewhere" fight, which doesn't help much. Over the fight, the Intelligence is clearly starting to show signs of going haywire though (as the scientist said, absorbing human DNA left it unstable), and Carol slowly realizes this and develops a strategem as she realizes Maria is fighting from within the Intelligence. Carol basically stops fighting and gambles on singing Kiss Me Deadly (the song her and Maria sing in the karaoke of the first movie) while the Intelligence wails on her and prepares to absorb her, but the memory of the song seems to only make the Intelligence more unstable. She starts to absorb Carol and we have the "mind white room" of the Intelligence and a scrambled flux of memories from Carol and Maria's relationship over the years, with the Intelligence visibly struggling to resist the flow of information and suppress those memories (and Kiss Me Deadly, which is still playing). Then Carol, both in the real and mental world, gives a Big Damn Kiss on Maria/The Intelligence while releasing her cosmic power. The chain reaction kickstarted by this causes a overload of the Supreme Intelligence, which is destroyed by it. Maria and Carol continue their Big Damn Kiss while Kiss Me Deadly plays (get it).

Down below, Ronan is getting overwhelmed by Att-Lass, Talos and Annelle and their forces. As he realizes he is fucked he goes get out of dodge alongside Korath the Pursuer and leaves stage right. Ronan's last scene is speeding away from the Throneworld as he angrily tries to imagine something that can stop Carol. Cue Thanos showing up on his comlink, with a tempting offer....

In the Throneworld, Queen Annelle reigns supreme . Att-Lass shows up and kneels before her, saying he has too much blood in his hands but the Kree people have sufered enough. Annelle raises her sword, considering executing him, but Carol shakes her head at the Skrull Queen and she gives up, reluctantly. She echoes Carol's speech about hope and unity and lets Att-Lass rise again, now as Kree Emperor,, hoping that together they can forge lasting peace between the two people. Peace treaty signed, happy ending, Carol and Maria kiss and act as moms to Monica.

Post-credits scenes 1: In her sleep, Maria seems to display powers exactly like Marvel's (presumably a side-effect of the merging process).

post-credits scene II: Gorr the God-Butcher watches the galaxy rejoice for Captain Marvel, and seems to take some interest.

1. Okay, so the structure seems to be:

Act 1: Carol breaks the last of the Kree fleets and decides to finish off their capital.

Act 2: The Kree prepare the Supreme Intelligence to battle Carol, and it beats her.

Act 3: Carol and the Skrulls vs the Supreme Intelligence.

My takeaway here is that Carol doesn't seem to do much in the second act. Most 3 act stories follow a general outline of "1. the hero learns they have to do an important thing, 2. traveling/gathering supplies to do the thing, 3. doing the thing." So if Carol's goal in the first act is to take on Kree central, she has to have something to do in between deciding to do that and actually doing it. What is she doing in between the opening battle and her Darkest Hour defeat that keeps her from finishing off the Supreme Intelligence right away?

2. So Carol's issue appears to be that she has been over-relying on her own brute force power, going in alone rather than involving the Skrulls. But at the climax, the Skrulls are involved of their own accord and Carol wins by harnessing her and Maria's bond. So this means the prior issue of "Carol's doing it all alone" is resolved without her changing her actions. Either Talos's speech to the Skrulls about her weakness should be Carol's speech, or Carol's speech to the Kree should be about her weakness. She should be the one to create motive from her own limits.

Or, another option, Carol's arc has to focus on Maria instead, because her victory is here is derived from invoking THE POWER OF GAY instead of fighting brute force. What's been going on with Maria in the time between the first film and here? Have Carol and Maria spoken or met in the time since? Has Carol been pushing herself to finish the war quick so they can be reunited sooner? Or has she been cutting herself off from Maria because she's decided her mission matters more? Has Maria been trying to avoid this terrifying space war and stay to a normal life, or feels she can't ignore it and wants to help Carol? What character flaws have kept them from uniting as they should?

The opening of the film shows Carol destroying a Brood ship before it enters the Milky Way. Then she returns to the Peak, the orbital headquarters of S.W.O.R.D., where she declares "mission complete." She meets Monica Rambeau, who has joined S.W.O.R.D., as well as the Director of S.W.O.R.D. Abigail Brand.

As she introduces Monica around the space station and tells her about how it's now in charge of protecting the Earth from any alien threats, a Kree ship appears right outside. As they are about to open fire, however, it broadcasts a distress signal and asks that "Vers" help the Kree homeworld.

Inside the ship is Bron-Charr and At-Lass, Carol's old teammates from Starforce. They tell her that Hala, the Kree homeworld, is in trouble – a few days ago, it was visited by "Heralds of the World Eater," but that the Kree Emperor is refusing to exacuate the planet. "We both know that the Kree Emperor isn't the one making decisions," Carol says. "Let me talk to her." Carol remotely talks to the Supreme Intelligence, which refuses to evacuate the planet, saying that they are confident they can repel the "World Eater" despite the rumors of how powerful it is. However, the Supreme Intelligence does say it will accept help from Carol to fight the World Eater.

Carol decides to go to Hala to fight this World Eater and both Monica and Talos decide to accompany her. They go along with Bron-Charr and At-Lass in the Kree ship. When they arrive in Hala, however, Talos and Monica are immediately kidnapped by Yon-Rogg. While the Supreme Intelligence talks to Carol about the World Eater and it's history – revealing that the five years since the first Snap woke it up after thousands of years of slumber and that the Kree phrase for it is "Gah Lak Tus" – Yon-Rogg takes Talos and Monica to a laboratory where he says that they were able to capture one of the Heralds of the World Eater and siphon off his energy ("pure cosmic power"). Now Yon-Rogg wants to embue that power in himself, make himself just as powerful and more than Carol, but he wants to see what would happen on a Skrull and human body first.

After leaving the meeting with the Supreme Intelligence, Carol tries to find Talos and Monica, but can't, until Bron-Charr tells her that Yon-Rogg took him. He tells her that he never trusted Yon-Rogg after Starforce broke up, that Yon-Rogg was always looking for a way to become stronger than her, and he leads her to Yon-Rogg's laboratory. Carol manages to save Talos, but the energy envelopes Monica. In her rage, Carol destroys the entire building and frees the Herald – the Silver Surfer, who flies up into the sky and vanishes.

Carol almost kills Yon-Rogg, but instead drags him to the Supreme Intelligence, telling it that "this is the end. After I save your people, I want you to shut yourself down. That's the price. And put this son of a bitch in jail for the rest of his goddamn life." That's when Galactus appears, the Silver Surfer hovering over his head. Carol goes out for the fight of her life.

Talos begins to see Monica, alive and made of energy, and goes to tell Carol, but Carol is already fighting off Galactus and the Surfer. And it is very very clear that she is no match for them. She crashes, bleeding, into the ground and merely gets back up and goes after them again and again. Finally, after she manages to escape the Surfer and go right at Galactus, he waves one hand and she falls out of the sky. Struggling to figure out what to do, Monica appears to her and tells her that this is a battle she can't win. Sometimes all you can do is lose and move on.

Carol goes up to the Surfer again and calls a truce. She tells him that she will leave them alone to consume the planet if they are allowed enough time to evacuate the people. The Surfer agrees. On the surface, the Supreme Intelligence tells her that this wasn't the plan. "Yes it was: I'm saving your people, not your planet," Carol says. "You can let them go or you can see them all die." "Go then," the Supreme Intelligence says. "I will stay and fight."

A day later, Carol, Monica, Talos, Bron-Charr, and At-Lass lead a caravan of Kree ships from the planet, evacuating the entire population. Meanwhile, the Supreme Intelligence has released Yon-Rogg and together they've constructed a Nega-Bomb, which the Supreme Intelligence has calculated will be enough to kill the World Eater. When Carol learns this, however, she says that all they would be doing is killing themselves and she would know. They refuse and she leaves with the last ship and they detonate the bomb...and Galactus eats all of the energy of the explosion.

On the Kree ship, Monica tells Carol that being made of energy feels weird, but cool. Talos makes a peace agreement with Bron-Charr and At-Lass. Together, they sit at the edge of the solar system and watch Galactus consume Hala.

After Carol comes back from destroying the Brood ship in the Cold Open, we see her having a happy family dinner with Maria and Monica. Then it's revealed that they are all on the space station, both of them having been displaced due to the Snap, but they are getting along. However, Maria tells Carol that during her physical, the doctor discovered that she has cancer.

Carol goes to Talos to see if any aliens have a cure for cancer and he says yes...but it's a cure specific to species. A Skrull cancer cure isn't going to help a human (it might, in fact, make things significantly worse). And the only species encountered so far that is close to human...is Kree.

Cue the Kree ship appearing and asking for help. Only now when Carol agrees to go to Hala, she does so in exchange for the Supreme Intelligence giving her a cancer cure. This gives Carol even more incentive to stop Galactus and it's even more devastating when she can't, because the Intelligence withholds the cure (which we know is probably Kree blood) even as it destroys itself.

After they watch Hala be devoured by Galactus, they go back to Earth and the SWORD space station, where they have dinner with Maria again. Cut to six months later and Monica is scattering her ashes in the ocean and giving the speech from the last issue of Kelly Sue DeConnick's run, "The Next Right Thing."

I had one idea but one I removed out of fears of bloating things too much and I wasn't able to properly integrate it to the rest. It involved Carol spending the second act not going to the Kree throneworld over suspecting and tracking down a Skrull double agent in their midst plotting to kill Queen Annelle (I wanted to introduce the concept of evil Skrulls), but that concept felt too removed from the rest of the narrative so I left it out.

The simpler route I can think of, though, would be having the second act mostly consist of Captain Marvel tearing a bloody path through the Kree Empire's territory on her way to the Throneworld, with the last remnants of the Kree Fleet doing a collective Last Villain Stand to Hold the Line until the Intelligence is at proper form and Ronan has Maria. It'd be a fun reversal of the usual narrative of the heroes doing prolonged last stands to hold off the overwhelming evil menaces (like a sizeable chunk of Return of the King consist of heroic factions trading heroic last stands between them to hold back the evil horde until their various plans come into fruition). You could have Bron-Charr (The Brute of Starforce) serving as the as the Kree Empire's last line of defense with the heavy artillery and filling the villainous role during Act 2 before being dealt with. Interspeed this bloody path with Carol interacting with Talos and bonding about their families (i.e Talos with his wife and kiddo and you have a solid concept.

Either that or you can rearrange the structure around a bit to have Carol take off for the Throneworld before Maria is captured so you can have an act two of them interacting through some sort of comlink until she actually is captured. It'd kind of rob the Intelligence's ultimatum of some of its punch, but it'd a possible route to take, and it'd be a way to expand Carol and Maria's relationship.

Good point. My conception would lean to the latter, since Carol's speech does help kickstart the powder keg crowd.

And finally:

Yeah that was the gist of it. I figured they'd still keep in touch via some sort of space communicating device, and that a secondary reason for Carol's drive to end the war would be to be reunited with her.