The Marvels Review

“Confusion is the first step to knowledge.”

– Dr Hank McCoy

If he were around, Shakespeare might have said; “Ah, Marvel – do we come to praise thee or to bury thee?” At this late stage in the game, The Marvels being the 33rd film in the Marvel Movie Universe, one could be forgiven for assuming that the Marvel films would automatically be a significant cinematic event. They certainly used to be, they’d be anticipated, eager audiences would mass at the multiplexes and the world was a happy, joyous place for a couple of hours.

Then two things happened. Avengers: Endgame and Covid-19. And the world changed. (That’s not a hyperbolic exaggeration, the world actually changed. Just look at the people you pass in the street as you go about your daily business. Their attitudes are crappier then ever before.)

The world has certainly changed for the Marvel Movie Universe, partly through the worldwide pandemic which caused a major glitch in cinema audiences as the public was reluctant to go out among other people (the public avoiding the public – you couldn’t make it up!) but more than that, Endgame brought to an end an ongoing story that audiences had bought in to as it unfolded over 22 films in eleven years. It’s now four years later and in the 11 Marvel movies released in that time, only the three Spider-Man films have come anywhere close to resonating the way this franchise used to. The rest have ranged from adequate to tepid to downright bad. The Marvels is the movie that needed to buck that trend and get the whole juggernaut rolling again. I can’t state emphatically enough how much I wanted to like this movie. In fact, I needed to like it (at the very least,) to get my enthusiasm for the Marvel Movies burning again.

I had watched and enjoyed the Ms Marvel series, which finished off with Ms Marvel/Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) somehow swapping places with her idol Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers (Brie Larson). Also in this mix now is Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) who is the daughter of Danvers’s friend from the first Captain Marvel film. Rambeau now has superpowers comparable to Captain and Ms Marvel as a result of her involvement in the story told in the WandaVision streaming series. And what’s happening is that every time any of the three uses her superpowers at the same time as either of the others, they swap places as a result of some involuntary teleportation. This is played for comedic effect, but the joke is overplayed to death very early on to the point that this, a Captain Marvel movie, incredible as it may seem, becomes tedious. And this is within the first half hour.

There’s a tension between Danvers and Rambeau, because they haven’t seen each other since Danvers left at the end of Captain Marvel, which if you remember, that whole film was a flashback to the eighties. So Rambeau feels like Danvers, her adopted aunt and hero figure, abandoned her.

Also, in the meantime, Captain Marvel is known as The Annihilator in some parts of the universe, due to her unwittingly being the cause of a Kree civil war some time ago. Now, here’s the biggest problem in The Marvels – that whole causing a civil war plotline should’ve been a two-hour movie on its own, not a side bar to this incomprehensible mess. At the one-hour mark, I had the distinct feeling that I was watching the third film in a trilogy having seen the first and missed the second. Add to that the fact there’s a wholly unnecessary sequence on a planet where everyone speaks in song, so we have an absurd song and dance scene which completely disrupts the flow of the already feeble plot and I realised I’d lost track of the film, and consequently – my interest.

There’s a so-so villain in Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) a Kree revolutionary who plots to usurp our sun to restore heat and light to her own planet but surely a plan of that magnitude should’ve been built up to in the imaginary second part of this trilogy that never happened.

Sadly, even Brie Larsen and Samuel L. Jackson seem to be phoning it in as far as their performances here are concerned. The previous care and investment we’ve seen them put into the development and integrity of their characters is completely missing. As a fan, I couldn’t accept THIS Captain Marvel as the most powerful force in the Marvel Universe, the woman who rescued Tony Stark, the one who just flew in and put Thanos in an armlock in Endgame. Nor could I accept this wisecracking oaf as the same Fury who put the Avengers together, the one we saw in Civil War. Part of the blame for this grotesque misstep has to lie on the shoulders of director Nia DaCosta, who was also one of the writers. She should never have been given this level of access to this franchise after her largely ineffectual and unnecessary rehash of Candyman a few years ago.

Honestly, Marvel needs to regroup and figure out exactly where they’re going, and they need to do that quickly and decisively because they’re haemorrhaging audience numbers. This one tanked on its opening weekend. Badly. It’s the worst opening they’ve ever had. This should be the wake up call they need after their underwhelming Quantumania, Eternals, etc. Maybe a starting point should be addressing their over-reliance on Disney + streaming series to keep things moving in-between films, this is clearly oversaturating the continuity, and diluting the quality of the product, making the overall collective Marvel Movie saga a convoluted mess of crossovers that is becoming difficult for newcomers to jump into. (But hey, that’s what happened with their comic books.)

Luckily, with the exception of Deadpool 3, there’s no Marvel movie due for release in 2024 and that, at this point, is a good thing.

Rob Rating = 3