The Marvels
“Captain Marvel” is probably my least favourite Marvel movie. I found the threat in that movie to be underwhelming, I thought it dragged, it made a joke of Nick Fury (especially the loss of his eye). I just didn't care for it at all. Between that and “The Eternals”, in my opinion, are the bottom of the MCU barrel. I think it's important to note that before we begin to talk about “The Marvels”.
As trailers started showing up almost a year ago, I continued to have low, low hopes. But, I am definitely a comic book fan through and through and was resigned to see it even though I was fully expecting another “Captain Marvel” flub. As the week of release arrived a slew of bad reviews came in. Now I try not to pay attention to other reviews until after I've seen something myself and have my own opinion, but in this case I felt like it was confirmation bias. So all that mounted against it, I'm pleased to say that “The Marvels” isn't God awful. It's not the next “Infinity War”, but it's at least not the next “Eternals”.
It's a short movie, just over an hour and a half. Which I can appreciate since it was starting to be commonplace for hero movies to be 2 hours+ as the norm. And given the type of tale it tries to tell, shorter is better. It's kind of a weird mish-mash of the early 2010s MCU films with heavy “Thor Ragnarok” influence. What I mean by that is that it's a straightforward film that tries to showcase a lot of different exotic alien set pieces. Sometimes it works, and a lot of the time it doesn't. For example, they visit a planet that only communicates through song. A really cool idea. And considering the MCU falls under the Disney banner, this could have been a great opportunity for an MCU movie snag a Disney level hit like “Let it Go”. But instead they barely sing a song at all. This incredible opportunity doesn't get capitalized on at all. I appreciate how different the idea was, but then they fumble it.
That goes for a lot of things in the film. They have a lot of Captian Marvel's space cat, which is funny in small bits, but they keep shoving it into scenes. The overdrive of space cat becomes so over the top at one point it boils over and actually becomes hilarious. However, what could have been a fun short joke gets dragged out way too long and you're left being like “Ok, let's get on with it already”.
The story also has almost no personal stakes for the heroes at all. The villain wants to destroy worlds that mean something to Captain Marvel, yadda yadda yadda, same old same old. But none of the characters are really different at the end of the film than when they start aside from a couple emotional angles that feel very wedged in and not natural at all. I guess it's fine because it's still an alright journey, but it's just fun fluff and that's it.
All three of the lead actresses are acted pretty well, but I felt like Monica Rambeau (played by Teyonah Parris) is the worst of the three. They write her character to have head snapping, eye rolling sass in every scene. Just very animated and over the top. Which is super strange because we already saw this character played in “WandaVision” and it Teyonah played it completely serious and straight in that and it was fine. So the tonal shift is really odd and stuck out to me.
They give Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) a bit more range in this film to where she actually seems more human, but again, it comes through sort of odd given what we've seen in the past. The only one consistent to previous iterations is Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), who is fun at moments. Kind of grating at others. She's the punchline of a few jokes that land really flat, which is too bad because she's probably my favourite of the three.
The mid-credits scene (there is no post-credit scene, so you can take off after this) is actually a banger. Really interesting scene that could foreshadow some really cool stuff in the MCU future. I wish I could talk about it more, because it's really THAT interesting, but I don't want to spoil it for the readers.
All in all “The Marvels” isn't incredible, but it's a big step up from what I was expecting, and at least in my opinion, a lot better than the first “Captain Marvel” film.
6.5/10
