Movie Review: The Marvels

The Marvels (2023)

Okay, and we thought Thor: The Dark World or Avengers: Age of Ultron were the black sheep of the MCU. And in retrospect, after a slew of middling movies like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Thor: Love and Thunder, and outright bad Disney+ content like Secret Invasion, the already controversial Captain Marvel isn't going to be fighting an easy fight, and that's without the unfavourable impression that the character (and the not-entirely-undeserved criticism that Disney/Marvel has been shilling the crap out of Carol) in some aspects of the fandom... and 'The Marvels' is already going to be fighting a huge, huge battle without taking into account that it's also a crossover movie featuring two characters that are introduced in Disney+ TV shows... not all of which everyone watched.

And that's already a huge, huge ask, and even for someone like me, who did his MCU homework and watched -deep breath- the entirety of the Infinity Saga, Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel, WandaVision, Secret Invasion and a couple other projects that tied into this behemoth... all throughout this movie I felt like there were so many random aspects that seemed to contradict the Disney+ shows I'm watching, most egregiously Nick Fury and the Skrulls' portrayals in this movie as opposed to Secret Invasion. 

Throw in a lot of questionable choices for the movies, many of which simply didn't land, and many of which are dragged on longer than they should be... and The Marvels simply isn't a particularly enjoyable movie to watch even to someone who's trying not to dislike this movie.

And keep in mind that I have a very low tolerance towards comic-book adaptations. Heck, I spent several years reviewing CW shows. And... I still find it hard to find anything nice to talk about this movie. 

The plot of the movie itself is simple. Thanks to some cosmic-plot mumbo-jumbo, Captain Marvel gets her powers entangled with Ms. Marvel/Kamala Khan, a young superhero from Jersey who's a gigantic fangirl who is a huge Captain Marvel fangirl, as well as her 'adoptive' niece Captain Monica-no-codenames-Rambeau (who in the comics goes by Captain Marvel, Spectrum, Pulsar, Photon, and many others) who is the exact opposite of Kamala's personality, and is disenchanted with an aunt that she views as having 'abandoned' her. Some plot-device thingamabob causes them to swap locations every time two of them use their powers at the same time, which... the movie and trailers make such a great deal of, but in practice it just makes action scenes jarringly confusing and bamboozling instead of 'damn, they did something cool'. 

And in concept, the discussion and deconstruction of Carol Danvers as some kind of messianic saviour figure is an interesting one even if arguably we've never really seen that in-universe other than Kamala's fangirling over her. But... but even this bit of dramatic event really isn't executed well. The scenes are there, of course. There is Monica being clearly peeved at Carol, them confronting the memories through the aid of a magic memory device, and later on making up after... one conversation? It really doesn't help that Monica is the easily the most boring of the three, and her big emotional moment feeling so unearned and neutered makes it really hard to invest in her. Carol's explanation kind of being shit (she feels ashamed and guilty for destroying the Krees, which... Monica doesn't care about?) doesn't help either, and if anything makes Carol feel even more unsympathetic because she isn't really fixing some giant cosmic threat and even goes to Earth long enough to meet Maria in her dying days, but... never met her niece? What? 

Kamala's story seems to be built up quite well, before it peters off without payoff. Just like her Disney+ show, Kamala's status as a new hero and a giant dork is built up charmingly well (even though that 'fanfic' moment ran on for a bit too long) and I do like the scene when she sees Carol basically forced to sacrifice a bunch of Skrulls during the destruction of Tarnax. Seeing Monica and the Skrull Emperor's attitudes towards Carol also seems to be building up into a whole deal where she realizes that the super-perfect hero... actually isn't as perfect and is as fallible as they come. 

...except Carol apologizes once, and somehow we're back to Kamala adoring Carol as this perfect role model, and that honestly feels even worse than if we didn't have this buildup at all. 

Carol herself also gets built up as someone a bit more exhausted, someone who, off-screen, has been dealing with a lot of the fallout of Captain Marvel (which took place in the 90's) such as going to Hala and waging a one-woman war against the Kree Empire, blowing up the Kree Supreme Intelligence as she promised... and making things worse. On one hand, I do like it because it does explain the confusing state of the fragmented Kree Empire as we saw in Guardians of the Galaxy and other projects... but it all gets breezed over so fast that it doesn't really get a chance to sink in. 

The fact that it's implied that there has been a long time since Carol fucked things up and she hasn't really done much to fix things for the Kree (who lives in a world where the climate became toxic to them) or the Skrulls (who are refugees and with many of them stuck on Earth in Secret Invasion) or come back to talk to Monica... yeah, it ends up making Carol feel unintentionally unsympathetic. 

And all of this could've been handwaved as just window-dressing, if the rest of the movie was a bit more engaging. Sure, we've got our typical fare of superhero punchy-punch and beamy-beam, but the movie itself really isn't anywhere as fun as it thinks it is. And even at the surprisingly short runtime for a MCU movie, at 100 minutes, the movie feels long. There is a whole long subplot that really doesn't add much and is a drawn-out joke with Nick Fury being shocked and surprised and dropping one-liners at everything on the SABER base -- culminating with an also overly-long sequence of Goose's Flerken kittens swallowing panicking SABER personnel so they can be evacuated from an exploding space station. It really just isn't funny to me, and ran on for way too long to be funny, and the fact that the named protagonists (Nick and the Khans) get to not be swallowed by the cats for some arbitrary reason just feels confusing. 

There's also a sequence in the middle of the movie where our heroes spend a chunk of time in Aladna, the planet where people have to communicate with song. I love musicals. I love singing. I like songs in my movies. And while Brie Larson's singing voice is wonderful, this whole scene just feels like an indulgent chunk that is drawn out, doesn't add anything into the movie other than a huge dose of WTF-ness, and to top it off... Prince Yan and the rest of the Aladnans' fates aren't even addressed by the end of the movie, making me even more frustrated that we spend time here. 

Speaking of which, let's discuss another wasted sequence... the secondary characters. The Khans are just a couple more jokes away from being reduced to 'funny foreign extras', which is the entire antithesis of everything that their source show, Ms. Marvel, wanted to show. I do like that Kamala's mother Muneeba at least gets to show off some of her great worried-mom concern and browbeating, but they ultimately could've been better served cut off after the end of the fight in their destroyed house. There was absolutely no reason why Fury brought them to the SABER space station other than maybe to justify the actors' paycheques, since they were all honestly utterly wasted. 

Nick himself is also kind of wasted, and it's kind of bizarre why he's in this movie, again, other than 'oh, he's in the first Captain Marvel'. More egregiously, for a franchise that prides itself on continuity, Nick feels so much more jovial than his world-weary characterization in Secret Invasion... so much that many people question whether the two series are meant to be canon. The two fit together, if you squint and pay attention to what's being said by the boring background Skrulls in Secret Invasion, but absolutely nothing of that Disney+ show is brought forwards to Fury or the Skrulls' portrayal in this movie. Emperor Drogge and the random small Skrull colony that got fucked up by Dar-Benn is utterly flat, barely explored, and honestly feels so different from the disenfranchised, frustrated refugees in Secret Invasion. I honestly could fill a full article about how inconsistent the Skrulls were portrayed across the different MCU projects, but I really just don't have the energy. 

And speaking of which, let's discuss the main villain, Dar-Benn. She's so... so flat. There's absolutely nothing of particular interest about her, and it's a shame because she starts to build up a backstory. She was a random member of the Kree Starforce, similar to Yon-Rogg, Minn-Erva and Korath and the rest... and saw Carol as 'the Annihilator' like the rest of the Kree. She has what is, on paper, a sympathetic goal of wanting to restore the Kree homeworld of Hala. But whether it's playing up her sympathy points, or playing up her sadistic, vengeful points, Dar-Benn just feels like an even more generic doomsday villain compared to, oh, Malekith or Steppenwolf or some of the worst superhero movie villains out there. The movie barely even acknowledges that Dar-Benn is sadistically targetting all the planets that Carol might consider 'home' for her insane plan...

...which, by the way, is something straight out of the Golden Age comics because Dar-Benn steals the atmosphere, water and sun from various different Tarnax, Aladna and Earth. And it's not that the MCU hasn't done stupid old-school comic book plots -- Thanos's plan is to use magic cosmic stones to kill half the population in the universe, and the way the movies frame it makes it look 'oh, they made this stupid comic-book concept cool'! Whereas Dar-Benn's portrayal and her utterly lackluster and underbaked backstory made it just feel stupid. It doesn't help that her lines are so generic, and she's given a pretty generic 'raaaah I am untrustworthy and evil' fight at the end. 

And let's not get into the fact that despite technically being of the same 'Accuser' caliber as someone like Ronan, and even with the same Quantum Bangle that Kamala has... somehow Dar-Benn isn't only able to give Carol a good fight, but Carol with two extra metahumans supporting her? I get that Dar-Benn is shown draining Carol's powers, but it really does stretch some credibility that she lasted that long. What's really stopping Carol from lifting a chunk of mountain or a random Kree spaceship and bashing Dar-Benn with it? They even get her super-hammer away from her a couple of times in the movie, and it's not like the bangle's doing anything when Carol's not directly in contact with her or shooting a light beam to her face. 

I've never been a huge 'power-scaler', but it really is bizarre to see Carol and Monica having trouble fighting against Dar-Benn and her hammer, and then two minutes later Carol's just flying and blowing up Kree battleships like it's the climax of Captain Marvel. It really is a major case of plot nonsensicality, and I really wonder if they couldn't have just, like, picked a far more suitable supervillain, power-wise, to fight Carol. 

And to top it off, the climax of the movie seems to want to shoehorn some 'multiverse' bullshittery for... no real reason. I still think characters like America Chavez are already shoehorned into the Dr. Strange movie, but at least within the context of the movie itself it works okay. Dar-Benn overloading the plot device ends up causing a portal destruction that looks identical to all the other times the space portals break apart previously in the movie, and only Monica explicitly saying that "another universe's bleeding through" that we even get what's going on. Monica sacrifices herself and locks herself on the other side of the portal in a sequence that's honestly rather bland in a genre that already does a lot of fake-out deaths. 

And then Carol just casually flies into Hala's dying sun and restarts it no problem, which adds even more to 'Carol, why didn't you do anything before this movie' questions. 

It really is hard to sympathize with a character that can literally do anything thanks to the power of plot... but it's not like Carol is regaining her powers or her independence in this movie (which was the excuse in Captain Marvel!) or that she's busy dealing with other crises, but the fact that the movie really does a rather piss-poor job at establishing Captain Marvel herself as a person... it really brings to mind the portrayal of Iron Fist in his first Netflix season, where they had an idea about the character but the execution and the story elements are just so terrible. 

The movie ends with the promises of a team-up, with Kamala recruiting Kate Bishop; and Monica apparently finding herself in a version of the X-Men movies' universe (with Kelsey Grammer's Beast!) but by the point the movie reaches this point I was already itching to get out of the cinema and going 'man, I wished I just looked up these two scenes online'. And I'm trying hard to note that it's not because I hate the people involved in creating this movie or think that it's 'woke' or whatever the words people like to use to bash these works of fiction... but it's just a bad superhero movie, and a huge waste of so many of the characters involved. A bland antagonist, three back-to-back unengaging climaxes, terrible continuity with previous project, character build-ups that don't get paid off, extended scenes on 'jokes' like the Flerken and the musical planet... yeah, sorry. I think I can easily call this my least favourite MCU project. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Post-Credits Scene:
  

• A mid-credits scene shows Monica Rambeau showing up in what appears to be the Fox X-Men universe, specifically the pre-soft-reboot version with Kelsey Grammer acting as Beast. That universe's Maria Rambeau is also a superhero, explicitly called Binary, and at the very least a Professor X is around. 
  
• Past Movies Continuity:
• Captain Marvel was last seen in Avengers: Endgame (and a brief cameo in the stinger for Shang-Chi), and many references to the events of Captain Marvel is mentioned... particularly Carol promising a confrontation with the Kree Supreme Intelligence. 
• The Skrull memory-torture devices make a return from that movie, which is used by the three Marvels. Scenes lifted straight from WandaVision and Ms. Marvel are shown. 
• Kamala Khan, obviously, was last seen in her Disney+ TV series, Ms. Marvel. 
• Monica Rambeau as an adult, as well as her mother's fate in the primary MCU universe, was established in WandaVision, where she cheekily comments about getting her powers after walking through a 'witch hex'. 
• Nick Fury was first seen associated with S.A.B.E.R. in Spider-Man: Far From Home, and he was involved in a Skrull saga on Earth in Secret Invasion. 
• While there are many major tonal inconsistencies with the way the Skrulls are depicted in Secret Invasion, that show did mention a Kree/Skrull summit, as well as Emperor Drogge's colony.
• S.A.B.E.R.'s space base was first seen in the post-credits scene of Spider-Man: Far From Home. 
• Valkyrie was last seen in Thor: Love and Thunder, and she briefly mentions being in an unexpected 'team', presumably referring to the events of that movie and/or Ragnarok. 
• The hexagonal jump points are prominently featured throughout all three Guardians of the Galaxy movies, though none of them offer an explanation to the origin. 
• A different alternate-universe Maria Rambeau was the Captain Marvel of Earth-838 (the Illuminati universe), as seen in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. 
• Movie Superhero Codenames: Due to Kamala being a gigantic superhero geek, she latches on to 'Captain Marvel' and 'Ms. Marvel' quite a bit, and even lampshades trademarks. Monica's codename is a bit of a gag -- her comic-book counterpart actually switches through many names, and in the movie Kamala goes through a slew of names, some of which are ridiculous and some of which are her actual comic-book counterpart names. Maria Rambeau of the X-Men universe, meanwhile, uses 'Binary', which is Carol's superhero name in some of the titles where she is an X-Men supporting character. 
• Worth noting that the merchandise associated to the movie alternate between 'Captain Rambeau' and 'Photon'.
• Among the many names that Kamala workshops for Monica, 'Pulsar' and 'Spectrum' are some of her comic-book counterparts, while 'Nova' and obviously 'Vision' belong to other major Marvel superheroes. 
• Favourite Action Scene: ...eh? I guess the very first action scene that flips between Carol, Kamala and Monica across three different battlefields is pretty cool. I do really like that Nick and the Khan family all join in the action, too. 
• Funniest Line: I am really partial to Nick Fury's deadpan delivery of "It's cool, it's just Carol."
• The idea of bangles that swap the places of Captain Marvel and her ally is used in a run of the comics where Mar-Vell (the first Captain Marvel) was trapped in the Negative Zone, and his non-powered ally Rick Jones would use the Nega-Bands to swap places with Mar-Vell. 
• The movie also establishes Kamala and Dar-Benn's bangles as the Quantum Bands, a set of artifacts normally associated with the superhero Quasar. 
• Aladna, Prince Yan and its bizarre matriarchal rule is first featured with minor X-Men character Lila Cheney, and recently in a 2014 comic run became associated with Carol Danvers. 
• While on Carol's suit, Monica puts on Carol's Nine Inch Nails shirt from Captain Marvel. 
• Monica's Aladna outfit comes with the draping sleeves that her comic-book counterpart is known for during her tenure as Captain Marvel. She rips it off almost immediately, however. 
• Kamala and Carol discuss Dar-Benn's weapon, calling it an 'Universal Weapon', but also its lesser-known alternate name in the comics of 'Cosmi-Rod'.
• The Kree Supreme Intelligence being shown as a giant, green vaguely heart-shaped head is accurate to how he looks in the comics, though in his brief appearance in this movie it looks far more robotic. 
• The SABER escape pod briefly passes through the Statue of Liberty, and it's still unoxidized just like how it was in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
• The way Kamala talks and tries to recruit Kate Bishop for her team is an in-universe attempt to mimic the original post-credits scene in Iron Man, down to her quoting some of the lines that Nick Fury said. 
• Kamala name-drops the fact that Ant-Man has a daughter (Cassie Lang, a.k.a. Stinger). 
• Beast name-drops 'Charles', which of course refers to Professor X. 
• As noted above, alternate-universe Maria's codename of 'Binary' was that Carol Danvers had. She obtained this moniker during a cosmic run of Uncanny X-Men, shortly after waking up from her infamous coma. 
• The sound of Goose vomiting can be heard in the absolute end of the credits, a reference to the original post-credits scene of Captain Marvel, which showed Goose vomiting out the Tesseract.