Post by Dracula on Nov 16, 2023 18:12:45 GMT -5
The Marvels(11/9/2023)
So, this definitely isn’t a perfect Marvel movie. I might not even call it a particularly good one and would rank it in the bottom half of their rather lengthy filmography, probably somewhere around the place I’d rank something like Shang-Chi or Ant-Man or even the original Captain Marvel. But because of when it came out this movie is getting way more criticism than any of those movies did. Like, The New York Post gave this thing zero stars… that seems plainly ridiculous to me. When all is said and done I think a lot of people are going to be a little embarrassed for having engaged in this much of a pile-on of what is at worst a pretty harmless superhero flick. That having been said I don’t think I want to die defending this hill either. The fact that Marvel has made several other movies that got passes while having similar problems doesn’t change the fact that they’re problems and if they want to get back on top they’re going to have to do a lot better than this.
*** out of Five
When it comes to the MCU, it feels like there’s blood in the water, and it feels like things shifted with them extraordinarily fast. Marvel had a fairly successful 2022 all told but there was a clear decrease in overall enthusiasm and 2023 has been kind of a disaster with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania being one of their least successful releases and their “Secret Invasion” TV series being rather hated. This has led to a media narrative that, frankly, kind of feels like a pile-on. It seems like everyone who’s long had misgivings about Marvel’s box-office dominance in the 2010s are relishing the idea of them being on the ropes and this has reached a crescendo with the release of The Marvels, which they almost seem to be willing into becoming a box office failure which could act as a knockout blow for the brand. In some ways I feel like I should be among the people happy about this given that I certainly don’t love the idea of franchise dominance of the box office, but I must say I feel like the MCU is more of a symptom of this problem than it is the disease and that they’ve been somewhat scapegoated over the years. Beyond that, I don’t know, there just seems to be a hyperbole to the whole narrative. I could do without the MCU TV shows and their recent movies often haven’t been their best, but are they really that much worse than a lot of what came before? Is Thor: Love and Thunder that much worse than Thor: The Dark World? For that matter was the most recent Ant-Man really that horrible or are people just excited to declare it as such because it’s cool to hate on Marvel now? I actually really like Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness but people almost instinctively lump that in with the other “failures” in a way that doesn’t seem fair at all. It all just kind or wreaks of a sort of trend hopping to me and there seems to be something particularly ugly about how closed minded people are about The Marvels, firstly because the Marvel haters seem to be in an unholy alliance of “anti-woke” people who also want the movie to fail, but also just because everyone seems to have pre-judged the movie long before they saw it and are excited to turn that into a self-fulfilling prophesy.
The Marvels is ostensibly a sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel but is also a team-up between Carol Danvers AKA Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) and two other characters who were more or less introduced in MCU TV series. First there’s Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), who met Danvers in the first movie but who we met as an adult in the show “Wandavision” where she gained powers that allowed her to phase through solid objects. Then there’s Kamala Khan AKA Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani), who we met in the show “Ms. Marvel” and is a sixteen year old Pakistani-American girl from Jersey City who gained Green Lantern like powers to manifest objects using a bangle and has this “fangirl” relationship to Captain Marvel and the other Avengers. The fates of these three become intertwined after a Kree leader named Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) finds the companion Bangle to Kamala Khan’s and recognizes it as a powerful artifact that can be used to make tears in space-time. This event, combined with Danvers and Rambeau touching one of these rifts Dar-Benn opened, Leads the three central heroes to become “linked” to one another resulting in them suddenly switching places with one another whenever one of them uses their light powers, resulting in a chaotic situation in which all three of them are teleporting between three different locations in the galaxy mid action sequence. Eventually this will force them to team up to try to find out what Dar-Benn is doing and try to defeat her.
As you can tell from the set-up, this is more or less the first Marvel movie to focus heavily on characters that were introduced in some of Marvel’s Diseny+ shows and that may well be something of a deal breaker for some people. I will say that it really isn’t that hard to get the gist of what these characters are about from context clues without watching the shows, but still, people who are generally suspicious about Marvel’s interconnectedness will be doubly annoyed by this. Despite that I don’t really think this is really all that much more obsessively tied to other Marvel movies than most MCU flicks are, especially the ones that aren’t cordoned off in their own worlds like Guardians of the Galaxy. Also, what can I say, these are fun characters who work well together. Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan in particular is a standout who’s bubbly personality gives the MCU exactly the injection of fun it needs and she works particularly well in the smaller doses involved in a feature film than the long term storytelling of a TV series. Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau is less of a standout but works well enough as a “straight man” in all of this and of course Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel continues to be a fairly effective if not entirely defined superhero presence in her own right. Together they have good chemistry and funny moment together and the movie also has some fun with its character place swapping gimmick.
Beyond that the film has some decent if not incredible action scenes and has some interesting locations and ideas here and there and overall has all the fixings and element of a fun MCU romp, that’s the good side of it, unfortunately there are also definitely some real flaws here with the first and foremost issue being that is seems like it was cut to ribbons at some point in post-production. The film runs a relatively breezy 105 minutes, which would be a good thing under certain circumstances but I have a strong hunch that this was originally supposed to be longer and it got its runtime reduced significantly and the things they cut appear to have been key exposition that makes the cause of the body swapping science fiction mechanic made more sense. Another thing that seems to have been removed are the motivations and personality of the film’s villain, Dar-Benn, who is one of the weakest MCU villains since the days of Ronan the Accuser and Malekith the Dark Elf. That’s a pretty substantial step back because even the weakest recent MCU films have at least had somewhat interesting villains in them like Gorr the God Butcher and Kang the Conqueror. But the film’s obvious post production tinkering is even more apparent than all of that, there are basic insert shots and scene transitions that seem to be missing. It’s surprisingly noticeable especially when you catch onto it and it all makes the film’s first half a little disorienting.
*** out of Five
