This is the Marvel studio’s first standalone female-fronted superhero flick, and that’s more or less the most exciting thing about it. It’s also the first Marvel movie to be directed by a woman, Anna Boden, albeit in collaboration with her longtime partner Ryan Fleck.

Almost everything else about Captain Marvel tends towards the sub-standard, from the special effects to the action sequences, the scattershot storytelling and the slapstick.

After a lengthy opening segment set on an alien planet, the titular spacefarer whose DNA has accidentally fused with those of extraterrestrials crash-lands on Earth , circa the mid-1990s.

In quick succession, Captain Marvel aka former test pilot Carol Danvers encounters the fledgling SHIELD supremo , strives to assemble the pieces of the puzzle which left her an amnesiac, and gets caught up in a war between rival intergalactic factions.

Viewers may need superhuman abilities of their own in order to keep track of the diverse plot strands. A potpourri of secondary characters, including a duplicitous mentor-warrior and an omnipotent scientist flit in and out, making it impossible to care about any of them.