Directed by: Nia DaCosta
Distributed by: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Written by Anna Harrison
50/100
Watching the last gasps of the Marvel Cinematic Universe—for they are last gasps—has been akin to watching a beloved pet die. (For legal purposes, that is a joke.) The once-untouchable behemoth has been beset by a literal plague and increasingly diminished returns, and now it seems the norm has become mediocrity at best and mind-numbing at worst with only glimpses of the old Marvel to be had. If the MCU was once a sprawling, engaging theme park ride, it’s now that old rickety wooden roller coaster Six Flags refuses to replace or update, and “The Marvels” is just another casualty as Kevin Feige lashes out in his death throes.
Back in 2019, “Captain Marvel” made a billion dollars (undeservedly) at the box office, riding the goodwill from “Avengers: Infinity War” and the hype for “Avengers: Endgame.” “The Marvels,” which has barely made a splash on the box office charts, comes at the heels of disappointing installments such as “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and whatever the hell happened in “Secret Invasion,” and asks viewers not only to be familiar with the main MCU movies, but also the Disney+ series “WandaVision” and “Ms. Marvel.” As the plural name suggests, “The Marvels” picks up not only with Captain Marvel, aka Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), but also Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) and Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani, the only performer worth a damn in this movie), the latter of whom hail from television shows. Happily, you’re in luck if you didn’t watch Nick Fury’s (Samuel L. Jackson) showcase in “Secret Invasion,” as not a single thing (even Ben Mendelsohn’s Talos, who was a pivotal figure in the first film and “Secret Invasion”) is referenced from that show—good thing, too, because it sucked. Crossovers like these, once an endless source of excitement and money, have become laborious events that, instead of bringing beloved characters together after years of buildup, shoves together some people that only a handful care about for middling results.
So why, in this case, are Carol, Monica, and Kamala brought together in the first place? Well, uh, let me get back to you on that one, because I’m still not totally sure. There’s something involving Kamala’s bangle, which was featured heavily in “Ms. Marvel” (so sorry if you didn’t tune in) and more about the Kree vs. Skull alien conflict that drove much of “Captain Marvel,” but none of it adds up to much. Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton, criminally underused), the Kree Supremor (whatever that means), seems hell-bent first on somehow stealing other planet’s resources for the dying Kree world of Hala, and then later on obtaining Kamala’s bangle. If you squint, there’s something there about climate change, but you have to squint really hard, especially since “The Marvels” feels as though director Nia DaCosta left any substance on the cutting room floor, trimming down anything that might offer us greater insight into our characters. The end result feels like a SparkNotes version of the original movie, whatever it might have been.
DaCosta, in her defense, is not the first director to suffer at the hands of the Marvel machine, and likely the blame falls more to Marvel head Kevin Feige than to her. Indeed, there are moments of ingenuity and even joy amidst boring blocking and drab visuals. Due to some technobabble that is incomprehensible even by Marvel standards, Kamala, Monica, and Carol all switch places when they use their power, and the first full fight scene, which alternates between the Khan family’s living room, a space elevator on its way to Nick Fury’s base, and a Kree hideout, is inventive and playful; a sojourn on to the planet Aladna, where its citizens only speak in song—except for the planet’s prince, Yan (Park Seo-joon), who is “bilingual”—is the kind of silly fun that these movies should be bringing, though it is far too brief and feels hurt by the editing; finally, a scene of a bunch of space cats, aka flerken, eating all the humans in sight as “Memory” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” plays in the background left me in stitches and is a serious contender for my top scene of the year, though perhaps that’s just the theater kid in me. Those three scenes were joyous breaks from the nonsense elsewhere in the movie with their own identity and spark, and it makes everything else dull by comparison.
In that, unfortunately, “The Marvels” resembles almost every recent MCU movie: mindless slop for most of its runtime with a handful of great moments that make you think of what could have been. At this point, however, how much goodwill does the MCU have left? How many people are willing to slog through everything else just to get to the “Cats” scene? Judging from the box office, that number dwindles each day. I think it might be time for Marvel Studios employees to start dressing in black.
“The Marvels” Trailer
You can follow more of Anna’s work on Letterboxd, Twitter, or Instagram, or her website.
