Josh Reviews The Marvels

The Marvels serves as a sequel both to 2019’s Captain Marvel, starring Brie Larson as Carol Danvers, but also to Ms. Marvel (which introduced young Kamala Khan) and WandaVision (which introduced Monica Rambeau, who was the daughter of Carol’s friend Maria Rambeau, played by Lashana Lynch, and who held the moniker Captain Marvel for a while in the comics).  I love the idea of bringing these three women together in a crossover film, and I thought The Marvels was a lot of fun (although the story does not make one lick of sense).

The film has been in the news for the not-great reason of being a theatrical flop, making the least amount of money in its debut weekend of any Marvel Studios film going all the way back to 2008’s Iron Man.  Whoof.  That’s rough.  It’s a shame, because while The Marvels definitely has problems, and it doesn’t entirely work, I think it’s a far better film than the public perception seems to indicate.  It’s far from the worst Marvel Studios film.  (For example, I think it’s better than The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, and Thor: The Dark World.)

It’s a frustrating film in some ways because I think all the elements were here for this to have been a GREAT film, not just a so-so one.  The idea of bringing Carol Danvers, Monica Rambeau, and Kamala Khan together in a film called The Marvels is a brilliant idea.  All three actors are terrific.  The film works best when it allows the three to be together and bounce off one another, and we get plenty of that in the story.  (Iman Vellani in particular is spectacular as Kamala Khan; she’s fun and funny and she lights up the screen whenever she’s on camera.) I like the film’s silly, goofy tone.

There are lots of other good moments and ideas in the film.  I love the idea of the planet of people who communicate through song and dance, where Carol is something of a space-princess.  (I love the “princess dress” version of Carol’s Captain Marvel suit!)  I’m interested in the idea that a schism has developed between Carol and Monica, who looked up to Carol when she (Monica) was a little kid, but who grew up to feel abandoned by Carol while she was out in space being a superhero.  I like seeing Nick Fury back as a fun-loving, quippy but competent fellow (after the dour version of him we saw in Secret Invasion).  And I like the writers’ solution to the way the Marvel team inadvertently wrote themselves into a corner when they made the original Captain Marvel film a prequel set in the nineties, because that of course begs the question of what Carol Danvers has been doing for the past three decades.  I like this movie’s answer to that dilemma: suggesting that Carol’s attempt to defeat the Kree empire wound up causing chaos and a Kree civil war that decimated their home planet of Hala, and that Carol has been so guilt-ridden that she’s spent years trying to put things right.  That’s a solid idea, but I wish the film didn’t fast-forward through that story.  I have lots of questions about what exactly Carol did on Hala (besides killing the Supreme Intelligence) and how a Kree civil war could have, for instance, killed their sun.  Also: how long ago did the catastrophe on Hala happen?  (Was that decades ago or more recently?)   What has Carol been doing in the meanwhile, and so how her attempts to help the Kree mesh with what we saw in Avengers: Endgame and her attempts to help after Thanos killed half the universe?  I could go on…

Unfortunately, there’s so much in the film that feels like it’s close to working but doesn’t quite. The film is funny and silly, but I wish it was funnier.  The dialogue isn’t ever as sharp as it was in, for example, James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy films.  Nor does the film succeed in reaching the emotional moments Mr. Gunn was able to achieve in all three of his Guardians films.  There are several moments that are compelling and come close — Carol’s revelation of what happened on Hala, Monica’s speech to Carol about how she felt abandoned by her — but they don’t quite have the weight they should have because the film zooms by them so quickly.  I can see how on-paper the idea behind the villain Dar-Benn might have worked.  It’s a solid concept that she has a personal grudge against Carol and so wants to destroy the planets Carol calls home, while also doing whatever is necessary to restore her own home planet Hala to life and strength.  Unfortunately, in the film as realized this character is paper-thin and forgettable.

I found The Marvels a lot of fun to watch, but as soon as it ended and I thought about it for five minutes I realized that the film’s storyline was borderline incomprehensible and made very little sense.  This is very frustrating to me.  Here are just a few of the questions I have (and beware some SPOILERS ahead here, friends):

• What exactly are the Quantum bands?  Where do they come from?  What do they do?  How did Kamala’s grandmother get one of these Kree artifacts?  How do Kamala’s powers change when she’s wearing one of the bands?  (If the Ms. Marvel show answered any of those questions, I don’t remember, and even if it did, the movie should make that clear for new audiences, right?)
• Why does the villain Dar-Benn die the moment she puts on the two bands and brings them together?  Why doesn’t Kamala?
• What the heck happened to the beautiful planet Alanda??  It’s crazy that our three heroes abandon everyone on that planet to die, right??  This is my biggest problem with the film’s story — it’s egregious that the film never cuts back to Alanda to show us what happened to everyone there.
• Because the brain-looking eggs were revealed to be Goose’s children, and not any sort of enemy attack, who or what was causing all the problems — leading to fire and destruction — on the S.A.B.E.R. space station??  (I’d assumed it was Dar-Benn, but when she appears in Earth’s solar system she seems to have no interest in the S.A.B.E.R. station; she’s far away, by the sun.)
• We spend the whole film seeing growing problems in the jump-gate system.  So I’d assumed at the end that Dar-Benn’s actions would exacerbate that and we’d see Hala on the other side of the hole she tore in space-time.  So why suddenly are we in an alternate universe???  (And why does the tear in space have the same hexagonal-look as the jump-gates?)
• Why oh why does Monica have to go to the OTHER side of the tear to fix it??  That seemed ridiculously silly to me.  If you’re going to build up to her having to nobly sacrifice herself, then you’ve got to make it feel like a true no-win scenario, as opposed to this, where she goes to the other side for absolutely no reason.
• I’d understood in Captain Marvel that the cat-like Flerkens were eating everything they swallowed.  But here somehow they’re not consuming them?  So what then happens to the people/things they swallow — are they being stored in some sort of alternate dimension or something??  It seems crazy to me that people could get swallowed by the Flerkens and then emerge, hours later, unharmed.  (Though I thought all the cat stuff in the third act was very funny.)

I could go on, but you get the idea.  It’s pretty shocking to me that the film’s story has such basic problems.  (And I haven’t even mentioned the fact that the villain Dar-Benn’s plot has apparently been borrowed from the movie Spaceballs…)

Part of what’s happening here is that the film seems to have been edited to within an inch of its life.  The Marvels is the shortest film Marvel Studios has ever released.  The picture I get from what I’ve read online is that the Marvel Studios team knew the film had problems, and so they delayed it with the original intention of scheduling reshoots.  But the writers’ and actors’ strike prevented those reshoots from happening.  So it seems they decided to just trim this down to the fastest, leanest version they could.  On the one hand, that might have been a good strategy, because they did succeed in creating a film that zips along at a fun pace and never gets boring.  On the other hand, I feel like this film is missing both the character beats and the connective story tissue that are needed to create a film that feels whole and satisfying.

Someday I’d love to learn the full behind-the-scenes story of what went down with the production of this film.  Director Nia DaCosta (who co-wrote the film, along with Megan McDonnell and Elissa Karassik) has been depicted negatively in a number of stories in the press lately.  Was she just not able to handle all that’s involved in wrangling one of these big-budget superhero productions?  Or is she being unfairly used as a scapegoat?  Or both?  It’s hard to say.  I wonder if we’re seeing the film that Ms. DaCosta and Marvel had originally intended to make.  If not, what were their original intentions, and what happened along the way?

More thoughts:

• Brie Larson has been subjected to unwarranted criticism from trolls online ever since the first Captain Marvel.  I’m happy to see her back in this role and I think she does a nice job here.  She shows us the military stoicism of the character, but also hints of her good humor and charisma.  Like every character in the film, I wish we got more scenes that would have given her character a little more depth.
• I enjoyed Teyonah Parris’ work as Monica Rambeau in WandaVision and I’m happy to see her given a leading role in this movie.  I liked Kamala’s running attempt to come up with a good super-hero name for her, though I was surprised they didn’t land on one by the end of the film!  Ms. Parris does a good job in her emotional scene discussing her feelings of being abandoned by Carol; as with Carol and all the other characters, I wish there were more scenes that allowed her additional development and depth.
• As noted above, Iman Vellani is spectacular as Kamala Khan and is well-deserving of this big-screen spotlight.  She’s fun and funny and compelling.  I really hope we get to see lots more of her in the future (despite this film’s theatrical failure).
• It was great to see Kamala’s family from the show involved in the film: Zenobia Shroff as Kamala’s mother Muneeba; Mohan Kapur as her father Yusuf; and Saagar Shaikh as her brother Aamir.  It’s weird (and an example of this film’s failings) that these three characters actually get a lot of screen time, but I still feel like they were barely in the movie and I wanted more.  I wish they’d had more to do in the story.
• As noted above, I was happy to see this more jovial, silly version of Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury, though wow, it’s strange to see such a different version of Fury right after the dour, beat-up Fury of Secret Invasion.  I was not expecting this film to get bogged down in picking up storylines from Secret Invasion, but a little more connective tissue would have been welcome.  For example, wouldn’t it have been fun to see Fury’s Skull wife Varra working with him on the S.A.B.E.R. space station?  The end of Secret Invasion does make a big point of their going up to S.A.B.E.R. together…
• Speaking of a lack of connection to Secret Invasion… it was fun, and quite a surprise, to see Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie, but where did she bring all the Skrulls?  I assume she brought them to Earth, which is where New Asgard is… but wait, doesn’t everyone on Earth hate Skrulls and is out to kill them, as per the end of Secret Invasion??  Not a great place to bring Skrulls then, yeah?  Oops!
• By the way, is S.A.B.E.R. the name of the space station or the name of the post-S.H.I.E.L.D. agency that oversees the station?  How does S.A.B.E.R. connect to S.W.O.R.D. (as seen in WandaVision)??
• I loved the parody of the Iron Man end-credits scene, with Kamala in the Nick Fury role, recruiting Kate Bishop for her Young Avengers.  I was thrilled and very surprised to see Kate Bishop again!!  I loved her in Hawkeye and I’ve been impatient for her to return.  I really hope a Young Avengers movie or show actually happens!!
• I was also delighted by the mid-credits scene.  It was amazing — and another huge surprise!! — to see Kelsey Grammar back as Hank McCoy, reprising his role from the Fox X-Men movies.  I’m impressed and surprised that, as the MCU starts to move towards incorporating the X-Men, they’ve been leaning so heavily on the actors and iconography from the Fox X-Men films (such as having Patrick Stewart return as Professor X in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness).  I’d expected Marvel to start over and reboot all these characters.  And maybe that’s what they’ll ultimately do, but now I’m wondering if we’re not going to first get more connections to the Fox X-Men films through additional multiverse cross-overs, in Deadpool 3 and the in-the-works Avengers: Secret Wars film.  I am curious!
• I also loved seeing Lashana Lynch back (from the original Captain Marvel film).  I loved that they called her Binary, like in the comics!
• No end-credits scene??  Come on, this movie did NOT want to give audiences additional reasons to be unhappy.  Why piss-off all the audience members like me who have been trained to wait through all the credits, expecting an end-credits scene??  Why did they make this strange decision?  Also: the Kamala-Kate Bishop scene should definitely have been the end-credits scene, right??  Just like the Iron Man scene it’s parodying was??  Seems like a no-brainer to me!!

While I wish this film was stronger, I nevertheless found a lot to enjoy when watching it, and I suspect this is a film I’ll enjoy rewatching in the future.  I wish it had been better-received at the box office.  It’s a better-film than its’ box-office reception would indicate.  I do hope we see more of all three of these main characters: Carol, Monica, and most especially Kamala Khan.

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