'The Marvels' Review

Has the era of the superhero movie truly come and gone?

Marvel’s The Marvels is, simply put, an incomplete film. The thirty-third film in the mega franchise’s forever ongoing saga would better be described as three action sequences stacked on top of each other, under a trench coat, pretending to be a movie. Offering up little to no story, half-baked themes and emotional stakes, and their usual brand of out of place humor, The Marvels continues the downward trend of the studios recent output of projects made entirely by board rooms and committees. 

This isn’t to say that the movie is completely devoid of positive elements, although they are few and far between. There were a few jokes that I did find myself chuckling at, most of them coming from newcomer Iman Vellani, playing teenage superhero Kamala Khan aka Ms. Marvel. After her onscreen debut, in her characters Disney+ show last year, she provides an infectious optimism that makes it clear she was having a lot of fun on set. However, her performance seems to be the only one that is dialed into the light and breezy tone of the film, and it only highlights how ‘over it’ the more seasoned actors seem to be most of the time. Brie Larson, playing Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel and Teyonah Parris, playing Monica Rambeau flip back and forth between stoic and goofy so much, that it’s hard to tell what tone the film is going for. Despite that, it is nice to see an MCU film that doesn’t feel so self-important, and clearly wanted to be a more laid-back space romp, but it only feels this way half of the time as Marvel can’t quite get away from their sky beams and universe ending stakes that always take prominence over the emotional stakes between the characters. 

Speaking of these emotional stakes, the best I can say of them is, there was an attempt. Due to the shorter runtime, each and every scene is cut down as much as it possibly can in order to make way for the next and this becomes particularly egregious in the case of any dialogue scene. Kamala idolizes Captain Marvel but is given a dose of reality when her hero snaps at her saying that they cannot always save everyone, and a city is destroyed in front of their eyes. This is briefly brought up in the next scene but brushed away with a “I’m sorry I didn’t look at you as a real person” from Kamala. It would have been nice to see Kamala struggle with her hero worship throughout the film as she grows to understand the faults of her idol overtime, but sadly the movie doesn’t have time for that. Additionally, you would think that the conflict between Carol and Monica would be the driving force of the story given that they are the ones with the prior relationship, but it to is brushed to the side. Our heroes never struggle to work together, they are brought together through an unusual set of circumstances where they swap places if they use their powers at the same time (this is explained through comic book logic) but they get over this setback through the power of montage and it stops being a problem as quickly as it started. 

While I did say that there were moments that made me laugh, most of The Marvels attempts at humor fall flat on their face. Samuel L. Jackson has an endless amount of sass that gets old very quickly and Kamala’s family gets a surprising amount of screentime that always left me confused as to why they were still there. However, the worst attempt at humor comes in the form of an extended sequence wherein a herd of alien kittens, that produce horrifying Cthulhu-like tentacles from their mouths, eat the entire crew of a space station while “Memory” from Cats plays in the background. A truly baffling scene that I cannot believe made it into a major studio film.  

Seeing this movie brought to mind a recent conversation I had with a friend of mine wherein he compared films to pizza, with a Costco pizza being a baseline for a passable standard, that will tide you over on a Tuesday night. Anything that is below that baseline is by definition, no longer a pizza. It is either missing key ingredients or was not cooked properly. Anything above that baseline falls into the realm of preference. Everyone has their favorite toppings and crust types, but each one can still be called a pizza. One only needs to hear about the seemingly troubled production of this film to understand that this would fall below that baseline. Principal photography began in July of 2021 and was not completed until April of the following year. This was followed by two rounds of reshoots that resulted in the film being delayed five times after its initial release date of July 2022, no doubt being edited over and over again, which resulted in the shortest MCU film to date, that based on the finished product was only put out into theaters to mitigate the losses that the studio expected to take. Essentially, it was a pizza that was put back into the oven several times until they realized that it was beyond repair. 

I’ve seen a weirdly positive reaction to this movie online, as it currently boasts an 84% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and an average of 3 out of 5 on Letterboxd, but that seems to be the folks that are still invested in Marvel as a franchise. Those that still believe that the post credits scenes aren’t going to take five years to be paid off. These people seem to be the vocal minority though as the box office numbers aren’t lying. This ended up being Marvel’s lowest opening weekend ever and the film looks like it’s headed for a flop. I almost backed out of writing this, simply because I didn’t want to give them my twelve dollars, but seeing as there were only two other people in my theater, I don’t think it’ll make much of a difference. I will admit that it gives me no small amount of joy to see Marvel finally suffering for their shoddy output of underwritten and overproduced 200-million-dollar products. The trench coat seems to have fallen off as they entered the bar, and they have finally been asked to leave. Hopefully, they learn their lesson and can come back with some quality films in the future. In the meantime, I’m going to seek out films of a higher quality. I recommend you do too.