“Higher. Further. Faster. Together.”
Directed by Nia DaCosta (Little Woods)
Starring Brie Larson (Kong: Skull Island), Teyonah Parris (If Beale Street Could Talk), Iman Vellani (Ms Marvel, feature debut), Zawe Ashton (Velvet Buzzsaw), Gary Lewis (Eragon), Park Seo-joon (Parasite, English language feature debut), Zenobia Shroff (The Big Sick), Mohan Kapur (Ms Marvel, English language feature debut), Saagar Shaikh (Welcome to Forever) and Samuel L. Jackson (Glass)
Kree leader Dar-Benn (Ashton) locates the second Quantum Band, the first of which gave Kamala ‘Ms Marvel’ Khan (Vellani) her powers in her TV series. Using this to rupture the jump point network (as featured in prevous cosmic MCU films) and fight Carol ‘Captain Marvel’ Danvers (Larson) causes Carol, Kamala and Monica Rambeau (Parris) – currently working with Nick Fury (Jackson) and S.A.B.E.R. (Strategic Aerospace Biophysics and Exolinguistic Response) – to begin switching places when they use their light-based powers.
After the Khan family home is trashed, the family – Muneeba (Schroff), Yusuf (Kapur) and older son Aamir (Sheik) – are moved S.A.B.E.R.’s space station, while Carol, Kamala and Monica convene on the Skrull refugee planet of Tarnax. Dar-Benn arrives, accuses Carol of destroying the Kree homeworld of Hala, then cancels an impending treaty with the Skrulls and opens a rift to remove Tarnax’s atmosphere and send it to Hala, which lost its own air, water, sun in a civil war following the destruction of the Supreme Intelligence.
Realising that Dar-Benn is targeting planets that are important to Carol, the trio try to warn the people of Aladna, where the people speak in song and where the local leader Prince Yan (Seo-joon) is technically married to Carol for political reasons. Dar-benn attacks and steals at least a substantial, if not actually apocalyptic, amount of water, then heads to Earth to steal the sun’s mass.
Realising that the damage to the network will cause galaxy-wide devastation, as well as destroying Earth, the Marvels – so dubbed by Kamala – confront her, while Fury evacuates the space station by allowing his staff to be swallowed by a litter of kittens birthed (laid? hatched? coughed up?) by the flerken Goose.
Carol tries to reason with Dar-benn, accepting her part in Hala’s downfall. Now, if you are going to civil war hard enough to materially affect your local star, regardless of the external provocation you probably need to take a good look at yourself as well, and Dar-benn has no interest in doing that. She destroys herself trying to use both Quantum Bands, and the Marvels have to super-charge Monica to allow her to close the rifts, leaving her trapped in another universe.
Carol restarts Hala’s sun, Kamala sets out to recruit some Young Avengers (proving in the process that no scene in which Hawkeye II (Hailee Steinfeld, Bumblebee) finds some rando in her apartment is anything but gold,) and Monica wakes up in a universe with X-Men, including Beast (Kelsey Grammer, Storks), and a version of the heroine Binary who is the variant of her mother, Maria (Lashana Lynch, Matilda).
The Marvels got a lukewarm critical reception, and was review bombed for being ‘woke garbage’ before release, so it presumably must have something going for it.
It does.
Like so many modern Marvel movies, The Marvels is very, very busy and could use some time to breathe, but is anchored by strong performances. Larsen gets to be a little less uptight than in her freshman outing, Parris presents a character who perfectly combines physical and intellectual capability and emotional vulnerability, and Vellani remains one of the MCU’s great discoveries. Huge respect goes to the adult stars who allow Vellani so much of the limelight; it’s a solid move and one that any number of Hollywood divas might have fought against.
Nick Fury is the unchanging touchstone of the universe, but Jackson assays a range of subtle variantions, and the shift from the grim desperation of Secret Invasion to Fun Grandpa Fury is a palpable relief.
And then there are the Khans, the best and most supportive clingy family. I love them, and watching them deal with the increasing levels of peril surrounding not only Kamala, but the rest of the family as well, is heartwarming.
As an MCU movie, there is of course a lot of action, and it’s handled beautifully in this movie. The switching conceit gives the action scenes a distinctive dynamic, which is what superhero movies at their blandest forget to do. If you’re making a superhero franchise, it’s very important that everyone throws a punch in their own way – which is why Taskmaster’s fighting style in Black Widow works; you can identify the moves – but you also have to switch up the broader choreography, which is where zero-G, playing with portals and body switching come in.
The flerken remain equal parts delightful and horrifying.
Dar-benn is… Not the best villain. She has a solid motivation, but the film shies away from getting too much into it – presumably because it would have been super-depressing to really interrogate the violent collapse of a post-fascist society after the death of their totalitarian overlord – which leaves her a little tell-not-show. Ashton works what she has, but in the end she doesn’t have quite enough to make a Killmonger of her role.
It’s frankly weird that this film is set (according to the official timeline) after Secret Invasion, in which the presence of a whole bunch of Skrulls on Earth because Captain Marvel never managed to find them a new planet causes a massive beef, and then in this the Skrulls have a planet that gets its air stolen and then the survivors are evacuated to New Asgard… on Earth.
Full disclosure – I literally only realised while looking for images for this review that the evacuation of Tarnax so closely parallels the scene in Ms Marvel where Kamala is thrown back in time and has to help her grandmother safely leave India during Partition, which adds an extra layer to Kamala’s determination to save everyone, while Carol and Monica take a more pragmatic approach.
The Marvels is trying to do and be a lot of things. It does many of them well, but some of them just okay. It’s a lot of fun, and while it isn’t a stone cold classic it could definitely stand a few rewataches.
Ratings
Production values – Lacking any glaring CGI failures, and with some excellent use of music, fun design and inventive fight choreography, this is the MCU getting it right. 4
Dialogue and performances – A bubbly script and across-the-board exellent performances are the heart of this film. 5
Plot and execution – Honestly, The Marvels suffers a little from apocalypse fatigue. It felt like this one maybe could have been more personal. 8
Randomness – Flerkens, man. 5
Waste of potential – I feel like the film could have been a little tighter, a little smaller in scope, but overall it’s one of the highlights of Phase 5 so far, for what that’s worth. 6
The Bad Movie Marathon 