Main cast: Brie Larson (Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel), Teyonah Parris (Monica Rambeau), Iman Vellani (Kamala Khan/Ms Marvel), Zawe Ashton (Dar-Benn), Gary Lewis (Emperor Dro’ge), Seo-Jun Park (Prince Yan), Zenobia Shroff (Muneeba Khan), Mohan Kapur (Yusuf Khan), Saagar Shaikh (Aamir Khan), Leila Farzad (Talia), Abraham Popoola (Dag), and Samuel L Jackson (Nick Fury)
Director: Nia DaCosta
Ah, The Marvels.
This movie, more than anything else, is the textbook example of something done by Disney for the purpose of its own staff touching themselves about how noble and better than everyone they are because they are all about girlbosses.
Hey, there’s nothing wrong with strong female characters, but this movie has nothing but “Here be girlbosses, and you be sexist MAGA toxic white male supremacists if you say anything bad about us!” going for it.
Supposed to take place after Ms. Marvel, this one had been delayed so many times for re-shooting and re-editing and re-who-knows-what-else, it’s inevitable that it ends up being the biggest MCU box office disaster to date. I suspect that they didn’t add up the costs of numerous re-shoots and re-everything else to the official production cost of this movie, so it’s likely that Disney ends up losing far more than the reported $300 million plus.
Meanwhile, the director either decided to scram during the post-production stage to go off to the UK to do her own thing, if you ask Disney, or she has fallen out with those people and wasn’t even invited to the official screening of the movie, if you ask her.
Still, Nia DaCosta kindly takes time out from her career to accuse people of being sexists and racists after the movie tanks. Some things never change when it comes to diversity hires.
The behind the scenes and post-release drama is far more interesting than the movie itself, which I would say isn’t particularly horrifying but it isn’t good either.
It’s a shame because the premise has a lot of potential to humanize Carol Danvers.
You see, it is her glorious and thoughtless destruction of the Kree AI, the Supreme Intelligence, that started a civil war that led to the snuffing out of most life on the planet Hala. Dar-Benn vows vengeance on the Marvel Sue and proceeds to inflict on the planets that are dear to Carol the same fate that befell Hala.
Of course, to capitalize on this premise means exploring uncomfortable topics such as how short-term noble goals can lead to long-term negative consequences and how just wrecking everything you don’t like may not be the best idea, and this requires a certain degree of intelligence and creativity that is clearly lacking in the bunch of clown school diversity hires currently employed by Disney to defecate upon the MCU.
Instead, Captain Marvel, Ms Marvel, and Monica Rambeau now switch positions each time they use their abilities, the result of some “quantum entanglement” gobbledygook that translates to “girlbosses, don’t think too much about it”, and they eventually try to save the planets targeted by Dar-Benn while cracking out jokes and one-liners in the face of actual genocide and appearing as complete sociopaths as a result. Yes, this is Thor: Love and Thunder all over again.
The dialogues are terrible, with the climax being the much-meme’d Nick Fury yelling at Monica to use her “black girl magic”, a completely and hilariously unaware acknowledgement that, in the MCU, one’s race and sex are the now the true superpowers. Well, unless one is a straight white male, that is, then that’s more like a villain power.
It would be nice for these people to acknowledge that Carol’s gorilla-style blast-everything-to-bits approach is as destructive as those she destroys, but of course we can’t do that. Girlbosses are perfect and they can do whatever they want regardless of the consequences! Hence, there is barely any character conflict or development here.
In other words, this is business as usual for the MCU: tone-deaf incessant one-liners that just can’t stop even when it is most inappropriate to crank out one, puerile lines of dialogues that deliver more awkward cringe than laughter, and a deliberate effort to avoid any hint of troubling thoughts or emotional turbulence.
Still, is The Marvels that bad?
Well, it’s not a good movie, but I’d say that were I to compare it to the rest of the recent MCU offerings, it’s actually a step up from Thor: Love and Thunder, easily the most putrid train wreck to date from the MCU. With its runtime butchered below two hours, it’s a far less interminable bore of an eyesore than Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
However, it’s just… meh, because that’s as good as the present-day diversity hires in the Disney stable can go. The story could have been good had the diversity hires actually been capable instead of just hired for their skin color and chosen gender, so it’s shallow and forgettable fluff instead. The comedy is the same old cringe, the special effects have the present-day MCU clearance bin realness to them, and really, if you have seen the last two or three MCU movies or Disney+ shows, you will be getting the same stale fare here.
I do wonder, though: why Dar-Benn as the villain, and why make her look like someone that is perpetually online and complaining on social media? If they want a planet-snuffing threat, I’m sure Galactus doesn’t have much on his social calendar at the moment.
