In early 2019, the first Captain Marvel movie showed off the MCU at the peak of its powers. Not because of its own quality – it was a middling and minor effort from the powerhouse studio that, sandwiched as it was between the third and fourth Avengers movies, still broke a billion at the box office, evidence of the, at the time, insatiable worldwide demand for Marvel. Almost five years later and its sequel The Marvels has had the precise opposite effect. Again, not really on its own merits (it’s no worse than its predecessor), but as a blah when Marvel desperately needs a major win, the most blatant example yet of post-COVID Marvel as a broken brand that is often forgettable, even as it asks you to remember multiple projects worth of lore.
To really understand what’s going on when you head in to The Marvels, it’s not enough to have just watched, say, the first film and then Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers’s (Brie Larson) appearance in Avengers Endgame. No, this entry, taking place 30 years after the original’s ‘90s setting, requires some serious Disney+ homework, with three separate TV shows leading into this film. To know Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) as a superhero instead of the little girl that Carol was an honorary aunt to you need to have seen WandaVision. To know teenage Pakistani-American heroine Kamala Khan aka Ms Marvel (Iman Vellani) you have to have seen her self-titled series. And to understand how Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) has been holding up, and why a key character (Ben Mendelsohn’s friendly Skrull Talos) from the original is absent but unremarked upon, you have to have seen Secret Invasion, the show that killed him whilst being seen by about seven people and liked by none of them.
Not only is the story you get here not worth the multi-hour slog all that would entail, The Marvels’s reliance on the Marvel TV stuff simply cheapens it as a project, making it feel like a Disney+ show finale, not an actual cinematic event. It’s a shame, because (after the confusion of the overstuffed lore wears off), new director Nia DaCosta does manage to have some fun with her super-space-women lead trio. As they traipse across multiple planets after being forced together by a cosmic MacGuffin that means they switch places every time they use their (rather indistinct and inconsistent) powers, it’s a zippier, jollier, and more colourful adventure than the previous outing.
Armies of space cats, a planet that communicates exclusively through song (a bit more fun on paper than in practice, with a pretty half-assed musical number), and Kamala’s worried parents all bring a welcome light-hearted energy to the table, and it is nice to see an MCU film that runs at under two hours. It does all come unstuck in the finale, though, as the plans of forgettable new villain Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), a Kree warrior seeking vengeance against Captain Marvel, make the stakes way too high to actually mean anything, while the final fight is the film’s worst action scene.
Though the action is kickstarted by the consequences of her previous decisions, Carol is not quite the main character here – that honour would more readily go to Kamala – and that, along with a rather embarrassing post-credits scene, speaks to the grand problem of not just The Marvels but the current entire MCU project. Juggling their legacy movie characters with those who originated on their streaming service as well as all the alternate-reality multiverse nonsense, they’ve managed to hit the worst of all worlds, with no-one to anchor any of them. Whilst James Gunn’s third Guardians film earlier this year managed to be great (and make good money, which The Marvels seems to be dismally failing at) by deeply caring about its characters and deeply not caring about all the superfluous connected universe noise, the lessons gained there have not been adequately learned. Over the last year, thanks to the various DC movie calamities, we’ve learned what a comic-book universe death knell sounds like and, though The Marvels definitely isn’t as bad as recent MCU stinkers like Thor 4 or Ant-Man 3, it sure does make some ominous noises for this franchise.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 