It seems like it hardly matters, I suppose. Captain Marvel did pretty big business this weekend, opening to more than $150 million (although I sometimes wonder with how early they project a weekend take if a lot of it isn't fudged. They can also game the numbers somewhat by adding more theaters, which they certainly did in this case.) The critical reviews at Rotten Tomatoes are at 80% after dipping briefly to 79% (I guess they found another review or two that they could dubiously call positive that were added to the total.) After purging almost 60,000 user reviews, they've managed to get the user score up to 58% (with about 63,000 scores.) The more trustworthy Metacritic has critics score at 64 out of 100 and a user score of 3.3 out of 10. Of course, more trustworthy means merely that it more accurately reports what the users and critics have said, not that the users and critics are themselves trustworthy. By funny coincidence, I think Rotten Tomatoes user score is and the metacritic critics score, which are relatively close to each other might be the more accurate reflection of what people really thought of the quality of the movie. My wife and son said the movie was in the 60s and they liked it. I said it was in the 40s and I didn't very much, although I certainly admit it wasn't a complete failure on all fronts. My wife and son do tend to be easily pleased with movies and not very critical, for whatever that's worth.
I had earlier thought that the movie was going to be mediocre, but not actively bad—much like Black Panther, actually. There'd be some passive aggressive digs on the cultural war front, but it wouldn't be a raging "I hate white males" movie (even if the actress and producers do, in fact, hate white males, which I think is pretty obvious from their racist, sexist and altogether inappropriate and foolish public behavior the last several weeks.) I figured it likely that Carol Danvers would be a Mary Sue, and that at the end of the movie, once she figured out that "the patriarchy" or whatever was holding her back, she'd suddenly become invincible, boringly overpowered, and the conclusion to the movie would fall flat. I also predicted that French Cheese Larson would be a charmless and unlikable lead. So, like Justice League except with even more unlikable characters than that movie managed.
But then, as the controversy intensified last week and critics reviews were much more muted in their praise than I expected, and early user reviews were much worse than I expected, I started to convince myself that the movie really was going to be actively and aggressively bad. I don't know honestly if I'm glad or not to report that it's not actively and aggressively bad, just kinda passively and lazily bad. It's not The Last Jedi of Marvel Films, it's The Force Awakens, in more ways than one. In fact, my earlier predictions were almost exactly correct in every detail. I was left telling myself that I told you so, which is kind of awkward and weird, if you really think about it. I smirked a few times at a few jokes, although it wasn't up to the normal Marvel comedy. I thought Talos the leader of the Skrull guys, played by Ben Mendelsohn, was excellent. Jude Law as Kree strike team leader Yon-Rogg was also excellent, and Sam Jackson as young Nick Fury was... surprisingly underused and oddly put in a kind of ridiculous Stepin Fetchit role, which should be kind of embarrassing to everyone. Although, other than that, he at least has plenty of on-screen charisma, so there's that. I actually really like the Marvel Space stuff, and they've done a pretty good job with it. In fact, I'd suggest that that's the best aspect of this movie altogether, and that... I dunno. It doesn't save it exactly, but it does give you a reason to go see it other than the fact that it makes it quite obvious that they're going to do some kind of BS Captain Marvel Mary Sue to drop the ball in Avengers Endgame, and all of those years of watching Marvel movies is likely going to feel like it ended on a major let-down.
Sigh.
In actually more exciting news, at least to me, I found this interesting PCA of some Bell Beakers genetic samples compared to some other samples of other interesting characters, including some modern populations. What does it show us? Well, first of all, Bell Beaker almost perfectly coincides with Germanic and very nearly does with Irish and French too. There's also a very close (overlapping even) similarity between Bell Beakers and Czech and German Corded Ware. There's also some overlap between them on one edge and the Germany Bronze Age, although that tends to tail out away from the Bell Beaker cluster, overlapping almost exactly with some of the Finno-Ugric and most of the Slavic samples. Baltic and Slavic, by the way, are in the midpoint of a line that you can draw between the Bell Beaker cluster and the Baltic Bronze Age and late Corded Ware. Some of the Finno-Ugric fits in there too; Finno-Ugric actually has quite a wide spread. It seems to be the language family that genetically doesn't have a very strong signal; it tends to resemble it's neighbors quite closely. Although curiously, the Yamnaya samples are at a midpoint between the Bell Beakers and the Finno-Ugric cluster that isn't on the same cline as the rest of the Indo-European population, which is quite curious. The Ukraine Eneolithic is in this Yamnaya cluster (which is not surprising at all) as is Early Baltic Corded Ware.
However, if you look at a few more details, some other interesting texture starts to come out. The Bell Beakers do not cluster right with the Yamnaya or the Ukraine Eneolithic, and are closer to the Czech and German Corded Ware (which bridge the two, overlapping a bit with Beakers). The former two, however, are the same Y-DNA haplogroup as the most common in the Bell Beakers, and the Corded Ware is not. This is quite curious, and has bedazzled many observers, who note the Y-haplogroup and ignore the PCA. I'm not quite sure what to make of it, or how to interpret it. Whether it means that later arriving dominant male Beaker people took an awful lot of Corded Ware wives or something is unclear, but clearly the R1a-M417 rich Corded Ware Y-haplogroups are still common in Scandinavia and the rest of the North Sea coast; they make up a significant portion of Germanic populations today (or rather, their descendant clades do) as well as modern Baltic and Slavic populations. The Indo-Iranian languages also seem to primarily feature a descendant clade of this same R1a-M417 (the Z93). This suggests that regardless of what interactions later Yamnaya had on Europe itself, that the Corded Ware horizon is still mostly responsible for most of the extant Indo-European languages; Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, Germanic and Celtic (at least modern Celtic) and probably Italic all come from a population that is mostly Corded Ware in its formation, with various levels of admixture.
The Paleo-Balkan languages seem to be the exception (and their likely descendants like Greek and Armenian), as do the Tocharian languages, which come from R1b-rich Yamnaya-derived populations without the R1a-rich Corded Ware layer. But that's it.
I'm still unclear on the actual steppe pre-spread interactions between the R1a and R1b haplogroups and why Yamnaya and Corded Ware differ so much from each other (and what in the Corded Ware "pulled" them away from Yamnaya; presumably a substrate of Narva and TRB guys. I'm also still very unclear where Baden and GAC fit, but they were probably remnants of an earlier pre-Indo-European population that remained for a time near to the Corded Ware horizon. GAC may even be intrusive from the west, although it looks like they died off without much issue (no doubt later Central European populations have some admixture, but not nearly as much as you'd think.) They're not on this PCA, but I've seen others that suggest that they are a cline of EEF and WHG or SHG and have very little if any steppe admixture.
And it still doesn't really answer the question of who the Bell Beakers are and where they came from. It's clear that the later Unetice culture is genetically descended directly from the Beakerfolk, and that (most likely) the Celtic, Germanic and Italic language families all come from people who lived in the Unetice culture, and the aristocracy at least, if not in fact most of the people, who later emerged in those culturo-linguistic groups, are direct descendants therefore of the Bell Beakers. And it seems like a big portion of the Bell Beakers were, in fact, Corded Ware peoples who suddenly became very cosmopolitan about 2,800 BC, went all over Europe, spread their language, culture and genetics with them, but did admix a bit with the locals; they didn't just wipe them out and replace them. So they were almost certainly predominantly late Western Indo-European at some stage earlier than the division into those three language stocks specifically, and may well have included many people who belonged to other Indo-European language stocks or even other language families altogether, especially wives who were probably taken in Männerbund raids, which explains their diversity of geography and genetics to a great degree.
But those are pretty vague and handwavy conclusions, and I wish more detail were really understood. The Bell Beakers remain one of the most mysterious, and yet one of the most important historical peoples to have ever lived in Europe, and are an early example of my own ancestors at a certain stage of development.
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