Director – Nia DaCosta, Screenplay – Nia DaCosta, Elissa Karasik & Megan McDonnell, Producer – Kevin Feige, Photography – Sean Bobbitt, Music – Laura Karpman, Visual Effects Supervisor – Tara DeMarco, Visual Effects/Animation – Industrial Light and Magic (Supervisor – Pietro Ponti, Animation Supervisor – Kiel Figgins), Rise | Visual Effects Studios (Supervisor – Stuart Bullen), Sony Pictures Imageworks (Supervisor – Hamish Schuacher, Animation Supervisor – Derek Tannehill), Trixter (Supervisors – Ernest Dios & Dominik Zimmerle, Animation Supervisor – Simone Kraus Townsend) & Weta FX Ltd (Supervisor – Sean Noel Walker, Animation Supervisor – Karl Rapley), Visual Effects – Cantina Creative, Perception, Rising Sun Pictures (Supervisors – Dennis Jones Jamie McDougall) & Wylie Co. VFX (Supervisors – Elliott Brennan & Patrick Heinen), Animation – Framestore, Animation Sequence Designed by Noelle Raffaele, Special Effects Supervisor – David Watkins, Makeup Effects Design – David White, Production Design – Cara Brower. Production Company – Marvel Studios.
Cast
Brie Larson (Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel), Teyonah Parris (Monica Rambeau), Iman Vellani (Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel), Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury), Zawe Ashton (Dar-Benn), Zenobia Shroff (Muneeba Khan), Gary Lewis (Emperor Dro’ge), Seo-jun Park (Prince Yan), Mohan Kapur (Yusuf Khan), Saagar Shaikh (Aamir Khan), Abraham Popoola (Dag), Lashana Lynch (Maria Rambeau), Tessa Thompson (Valkyrie), Kelsey Grammer (Dr Henry ‘Hank’ McCoy/Beast), Hailee Steinfeld (Kate Bishop)
Plot
The Kree leader Dar-Benn obtains one of the paired Quantum Bands but her use of it creates a rift and causes destabilisation of the interplanetary jump points. Nick Fury orders Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel to investigate. Carol touches the rift at the same time as Monica Rambeau, an astronaut aboard the S.H.I.E.L.D. space station, touches the one in Earth orbit. This has the effect of causing Carol, Monica and Kamala Khan, a teenager in Jersey City on Earth, who operates as Ms. Marvel using the other Quantum Bracelet, to swap places whenever they use their powers. The three join forces to save the populace of a Skrull colony when Dar-Benn opens a jump point on their world with disastrous effect. Carol realises that Dar-Benn holds her responsible for the destruction of the environment of the Kree homeworld Hala and that she is robbing other planets of their life-supporting elements to revitalise Hala. As Dar-Benn turns her efforts towards Earth, they try to stop her.
But then around 2019 something started to change. This was the point of the release of Captain Marvel (2019), billed as the MCU’s first superheroine film and their first woman directed film. Shortly thereafter came Avengers: Endgame (2019), which basically killed off or wrote out their most popular heroes – Iron Man, Black Widow, Captain America, leaving only Thor and the non-MCU owned Hulk from the original Avengers line-up. From Black Panther onwards, it can be observed that the MCU had moved away from the fanboy base from where their most enthusiastic and vocal support has come into a focus on Identity Politics more recent entries.
The choices of directors with most of Marvel’s films of the 2020s has switched from those experienced with big-budget blockbusters and effects-driven films to the selection of directors who come from a diverse independent background whose sole distinction is that they have had a single arthouse or Sundance acclaimed hit. The fan reception of these has been highly divided. Nia DaCosta was announced as being the first Black woman to direct a MCU film. DaCosta had previously made the crime film Little Woods (2018) and the remake of Candyman (2021).
The fanboy reaction is neither here nor there to me. Although one thing that switches me off is that in order to make sense of the backstory of The Marvels you be conversant with four different Marvel tv series – Ms. Marvel (2022), which introduced Kamala Khan; WandaVision (2021), which gives us Monica Rambeau’s backstory; Secret Invasion (2023), which details the Skrull invasion; and Hawkeye (2021), which you need to have also watched to know who Hailee Steinfeld’s Kate Bishop that turns up right at the end is meant to be and have watched Captain Marvel to know who Brie Larson’s character and backstory is. In addition, you will also need to have seen 20th Century Fox’s X-Men films to know who Kelsey Grammer’s Beast who turns up in the mid-end credits sequence is.
The Marvels – (l to r) Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani), Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris)
Unlike Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), where you could fairly easily work what is going on, The Marvels is a film that requires you be conversant with these backstories. My watching time is valuable and I refuse to devote 16 hours and 44 minutes (the total runtime of all four series) that would be required just so I can get up to speed and follow the film. You cannot help but think in 20-30 years’ time when The Marvels is part of tv reruns, it is going to be an awfully confusing for someone coming to it for the first time, given that they have to look up four different tv series and another entire universe to understand what is happening on screen.
The Marvels received some of the worst reviews of any Marvel film to date. I entered into it cautiously, thinking maybe some of this was just fanboy hyperbole. But no, The Marvels is every bit as bad as it is being said. I have never had to give any MCU film less than two stars before but I would have to say that The Marvels emerges as the MCU’s equivalent of Batman & Robin (1997).
The lameness of The Marvels is never better signified than the opening scene where we see Iman Vellani’s illustrations coming to animated life around her. Hello, we are in a comic-book adaptation that is supposedly being made for adults not some kind of children’s film. And then there is a central aspect of the plot that requires the three women to randomly teleport and switch places whenever they use their powers. It is something you might expect to take place in a comedy – and some of the scenes here do start to play it as comedy – but as action sequences in a major franchise superhero film these have an utter lameness that leaves you sinking through the floor in embarrassment.
Not to mention the ridiculousness of the soundtrack choices. At one point, an action sequence with people throwing each other around is accompanied by a rap song (from Skrillex, Missy Elliott and Mr Oizo), which has the refrain “This the kind of beat that go ra-ta-ta. Ra-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta”, the effect of which is so absurd that you can’t take anything you are seeing on screen before you seriously. Oh and then there is the sequence with the evacuation of the space station that involves people running around rounding up cats, which equally absurdly comes accompanied by Barbra Streisand singing Memory (1981).
Brie Larson with jellyfish headdress
Although this is not as ridiculous as the scenes that come in mid-film. There is the visit to the planet Aladna where the inhabitants only converse in song. It is a sequence that is as absurd as it sounds, only added to by the decision to have Brie Larson enter the scene wearing what looks like a jellyfish as some kind of head adornment, followed by the prince sweeping her into a ballroom dance number. (“They turned her into a fucking Disney princess,” was the comment made by my viewing companion – and that is exactly what happens). Not to mention the action sequence that immediately follows this that has Iman Vellani going into defeat armed opponents by whipping them with a scarf. This is only superseded by the subsequent evacuation of the space station that involves a litter of cats that suddenly manifest Lovecraftian tentacles and an evacuation plan that involves the cats devouring all of remaining the people on the station and then rounding up the cats and putting them in an escape pod.
One shouldn’t be too hard or nitpicky on the creative science in use in the MCU, especially when it comes to use of terms like the multiverse. On the other hand, The Marvels does have some absurd science – people seen talking on the airless surface of a moon; where interplanetary travel is treated as no more than hopping in your car to drive to the next town (following Kamala’s abduction, Captain Marvel manages to travel across the galaxy in about the space of five minutes); the idea of robbing planets for their water (when plenty exists frozen in the asteroid belt); having an escape pod that conducts an uncontrolled re-entry from orbit and crashes in New York City where everyone emerges without even a bump as though the landing was no more than a car unexpectedly slamming on the brakes, as opposed to any real world situation where the impact would have left a crater; or that one person (Captain Marvel) could have the entire energy of a sun contained within their body. Despite which the end credits have two scientific advisors credited, which must be a perfect example of people being paid for doing next to nothing. During the scene where the cats devour people, I kept wondering why this would mean that people could easily be spat back out untouched – in most species, being devoured involves some digestion process.
Brie Larson is a talented actress. You need only see her performance in the amazing Room (2015) to see what she is capable of doing, but her appearances in the MCU do not do her service. In The Marvels, she could be replaced here and played by a block of wood and it make almost no difference to the film. The film tries to compensate and adds some humour to the interplay between the trio but Larson still looks stiff and awkward. In fact, it is the young unknown Iman Vellani that determines to have fun with her part and gets the lion’s share of the humour, running rings around the other two more seasoned actresses.
This does bring us to one the central problems of the MCU is that they are absolutely crap when it comes to their female characters. There is nothing interesting about Captain Marvel, even despite the writing in of a complex backstory in the first film. It is the same when it came to Black Widow who remains one of the blandest, least interesting characters in the MCU despite having a very interesting backstory on the comic-book page. All she is is Scarlett Johansson in a black suit with no powers other than her awesomeness. Captain Marvel sits at the opposite end of the spectrum and is ridiculously over-powered with no apparent constraints on her abilities. My feeling is that when you have a character that is so powerful that she can reignite a dying star, it ceases to matter what she does. When there seems to be nothing that can harm her and she is capable of incinerating an opponent (or the entire planet they are on for that matter) with the flick of a finger, you keep wondering why she would waste time getting into fistfights with them.
