Not a Captain Marvel fan? Ms Marvel did not work for you? You skipped Secret Invasion? You should still probably go see The Marvels, Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) latest big screen offering, if not for anything else then just for the mid-credit scene. It will at least make the Marvel fan in you unleash your first clap in the movie hall since Avengers: End Game and hope things will “mutate” in a better direction soon.
Not that you will have to hate-watch the rest of the movie, because it is not the worst the MCU has had to offer and there are some truly enjoyable moments. It’s just that superhero fatigue is real, Marvel fatigue is even more real, and this movie is not going to provide a cure for it. It’s the same old formula repackaged for (relatively) newer superheroes, with the same mix of — now forced — humour and crazy CGI battles with very little in terms of a story.
The movie begins with Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), aka Ms Marvel, sketching fan fiction of her favourite superhero, Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), aka Captain Marvel before she is zapped into a space station, where she replaces Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris). Rambeau, if you remember that far back, gained powers to manipulate all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, when she entered Wanda Maximoff’s Hex in WandaVision. Rambeau in turn gets zapped to replace Captain Marvel on an alien planet where she was investigating an anomaly for Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), and Captain Marvel ends up in Khan’s home in New Jersey. The anomaly happens to be jump points in space being created by Kree supreme leader Dar Benn (Zawe Ashton), yet another unimpressive villain, using a single gauntlet, the pair to which happens to be in possession of Khan.
Every time either of the three try to use their powers they get switched, leading to a team-up, and a fun practice-the-switch montage before they go after the latest space MacGuffin, which, in this case, is the gauntlet. Unfortunately, even as Earth’s existence is being threatened, the stakes just don’t feel high enough. The best moments of the film mostly belong to Vellani’s Kamala Khan, whether she is interacting with her parents, fan-girling over Danvers being in her house or being part of a superhero “team”. Alas, this might just have been a better film if it had focused on the superhero and her superhero fangirl adventures.
Larson feels more comfortable in her suit once she is allowed to play off the other two actors, even though her emotional backstory with Rambeau is dealt with in a cursory manner, as if the film just wanted to get it out of the way. Parris’s Rambeau gets the shortest shift in the film even though she might just be integral to where the MCU is hopefully headed. Yes, it’s all about the mid-credit scene again.
There are other fun moments in the film, including a new planet where inhabitants communicate via songs (a Marvel musical sounds intriguing), and, not surprisingly, Goose the Flerkin, who was the highlight of the Captain Marvel film. And this time around Goose has a litter of men (and other things)-gobbling baby Flerkins. Who can resist that many kittens?!
But despite its breezy pace and bright and cheerful outlook, the film feels like too much fluff and not enough substance. Then again, it might just be that we’ve seen too much of the same on the big screen and the small over the past few years and one just seems to bleed into another. Maybe that’s why the mid-credit scene has us excited. Maybe, a little genetic transformation of the franchise is in order.
