As the weekend winds up, it has become clear that the MCU's latest venture, The Marvels, has not been a commercial success. I guess an ad hoc team featuring an underappreciated and possibly underutilized film character as well as two who made their debuts on Disney+ streaming shows just didn't have the draw that people were looking for?
Everywhere you look, people are ringing alarm bells on behalf of Marvel Studios. A recent Variety article entitled "Crisis At Marvel" outlined a number of concerns including lackluster responses to many of the recent Disney+ shows, visual FX challenges, and the possibility of recasting or pivoting away from their current Big Bad, Kang the Conqueror due to possible criminal charges against actor Jonathon Majors. And Stephen King, despite not being a fan of the MCU, called out the gloating of many at The Marvels' box office collapse.
But you know what? Fans of comic book movies are pretty likely to have a good time at this film.
That is not to say I don't have problems with this movie; to be honest, I didn't really start enjoying it until maybe a third of the way into it, and both the plot and the villain left me pretty cold.
Thankfully Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel was there to carry me through until I realized that the villain and plot were secondary to the actual story, which was about three female characters coming to grips with their powers, roles and legacy (all while the 'quantum entanglement' of their powers have them swapping places from across the universe.
Vellani is just straight-up adorable, and her precociousness, combined with her character's fangirly exuberance, is a perfect antidote to cynicism. When Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) asks Khan how many chapters of Captain Marvel fanfic she is getting from one memorable interaction on an alien planet, the look of pure rapture on Vellani's face is not even acting, as far as I can determine.
Rambeau is still getting used to the powers she gained in WandaVision (and I loved how they glazed over her origin story as "you got your powers walking through a witch hex?") and is not really interested in heroics or even having a code name - but has unsettled business with her Auntie Carol from Captain Marvel.
Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), on the other hand, has added another nickname to her repertoire as the alien Kree now call her "the Annihilator." This eventually makes sense in context, but the fallout from the Kree civil war might have had more significance to us if a) we had heard about it before this movie and b) Captain Marvel's significant actions in precipitating this event weren't revealed to us solely through an underwhelming flashback.
Once the three principals get together though, the film really started to click for me. Khan's apprehension and excitement about meeting her namesake, Rambeau's resentment at reuniting with Danvers, combined with Captain Marvel's own compulsion to clean up the mess she feels responsible for as the Annihilator makes for a decent game of rock, paper, scissors, hero, artifact.
Zawe Ashton as Kree Accuser Dar-Benn is not given a whole lot to do. She is primarily there as a plot focus - a talking MacGuffin and resolute heavy - which feels like a real missed opportunity. And I don't think they even use her cool title even once in the film or do any sort of callback to Lee Pace's Ronan from Guardians of the Galaxy.
On the plus side, for me at least, they lean into the comic book weirdness, bringing Khan's delightful family (along with Carol's not-cat, Goose) up to Nick Fury's S.A.B.R.E. space station from Secret Invasion. And this is before introducing an alien culture who communicate through song and who may have inadvertently cemented Captain Marvel as the newest Disney princess...
In the end, despite its imperfections, you have a perfectly reasonable and moderately entertaining little film that not only carries the MCU flag forward a little bit (or more? stay for the mid-credits scene!) but also gives us our first superhero flick with three female leads, two of which are persons of colour and one of whom represents Hollywood's first Muslim superhero. And it isn't like you need to be a feminist or woke or whatever to have a good time at this movie, but maybe being open-minded helps?`
So in some ways, the barely concealed glee manifested by many of the same trolls who review-bombed Captain Marvel and are bellyaching about the lack of white male representation in these films (give me strength...) because this film is underperforming is not so much surprising as it is disappointing.
The sad truth is though, as the Variety article suggests, on top of needing to use less-recognizable heroes than the lunchbox stalwarts of The Avengers, Marvel has also put quantity over quality since the end of Phase Three, and people are beginning to notice. Some of this was a pivot to online entertainment during the pandemic lockdowns, but as a result, the MCU is building on a less sturdy foundation now, and the moviegoing public can be fickle.
Superhero fatigue is not a concept that resonates with me personally - as long as Marvel keeps faithfully adapting or even homaging the source material that I am a fan of, I am likely to keep showing up. Which I suppose kind of undermines the credibility of my MCU reviews a bit...but whatever. Reasonable people can agree to disagree.
The MCU can't really be all things to all people, and the bigoted mouth-breathers trying to chalk up an 'I told you so' can go pound sand as far as I am concerned.
I saw The Marvels with seven other people ranging in age from eight to 50+, and we all had a wonderful time. Most of us agreed that the movie was at its best when it pushed the plot and villain to the back burner and focused on our trio of heroines, and for the first time in a while, I am also excited about what Marvel Studios are trying to build to, despite the challenges they face.
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