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The Marvels Precisely Typifies a Flailing Cinematic Universe


In all my years going to see Marvel movies their opening weekend -several like this one on opening night- I have never seen a smaller crowd than the one that came out for The Marvels: less than two dozen in a large Dolby theatre. And that says a lot.
It can’t be denied, the Marvel brand is not what it once was. It’s always had its glaring problems, pointed out ad nauseam by its detractors of course, but in recent years it’s taken an unsuspecting blow to even its devoted following. You’d be hard-pressed to find moviegoers, MCU acolytes or not, who liked The Eternals, Thor: Love and Thunder, or Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. The brand’s ubiquity it seems has at long last diluted the market -people are craving more than the same old superhero movie repackaged. Additionally, the Marvel universe has gotten so much more convoluted due to all of the Disney+ series informing overall continuity and making individual entries far less accessible, that that interconnectedness once championed as the franchise’s biggest strength is now its most crippling weakness -to the point they’ve recently launched a new banner emphasizing self-contained narratives.
The Marvels is not the worst MCU movie in recent years, but it is the one that perhaps most encapsulates all of the franchises’ biggest problems at this moment in time. It is a movie where two of its three headliners were introduced in respective Disney+ shows, with a third show informing part of the film’s overarching context. It’s not completely incomprehensible for those out of the loop, who may be smart enough to pick up on some basic cues; but it doesn’t in any way engender itself openly to new audiences, establishing with little additional explanation the characters of Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), and the fact that they have superpowers that are adjacent to those of Captain Marvel (Brie Larson). You get a sense of Kamala’s intense fangirl energy through a flashy notebook animated sequence of her hero fantasy (a recurring staple from her show Miss Marvel, but that here feels incredibly out of place), and a haphazard montage of Monica’s experiences both in WandaVision and as the kid from the first Captain Marvel movie to emphasize her sense of abandonment as pertaining to that idolized superhero from her youth. Captain Marvel herself has been out on her own, rarely visiting Earth until some shenanigans related to their mutual powers result in the three spontaneously swapping places with one another across space.
This is one of the shortest Marvel movies in recent years and it can’t be accused of wasting time –fairly swiftly getting right in on the body-swap humour and chaos, and the action involving Captain Marvel and a tenuous diplomatic situation between the Kree and the Skrulls –tenuous because it seems to break out into fighting right away. It’s very hectic action, and especially during the first big set-piece, split between somewhere off in space and Kamala’s New Jersey home, it tries for a kind of spontaneity and sharpness in editing, often obscured by the CGI. And while the visual effects in this movie are a damn sight stronger than the last Thor and Ant-Man movies, they still aren’t in any way unique or impressive as they are relied on too much for the film’s visual language.
The Marvels is directed by Nia DaCosta, although she has shrewdly distanced herself somewhat from the finished product –ascribing a greater bulk of its authorship to studio head Kevin Feige. And that certainly checks out in how little of the movie feels in any way distinct from the greater Marvel hegemony. Almost every creative choice is either firmly utilitarian or obnoxiously cynical –remember that man-eating cat with the Cthulu tentacles that was such a hit in the first Captain Marvel? Well there’s a lot more of it in this movie –the joke by the end quite categorically driven into the ground. Likewise is the somewhat condescending nature of Kamala’s fandom-driven personality, a shallow impression of Marvel’s own fan culture.
Vellani can make it work though, and as in her own series shows real range when called upon. She is honestly the highlight of the movie, and is a good enough performer that it’s a shame her acting career will probably be exclusively tied to the MCU for the foreseeable future. Though not as much a stand-out, Parris also makes do with the material she is given, the weakness with which her resentment towards Captain Marvel is played notwithstanding. But it is Captain Marvel herself who is worst served by the movie, partly due to the convoluted plotting informing the bulk of her meagre character arc and partly because of Larson’s relatively stoic performance as the centrepiece of this trifecta. Obviously the film endeavours to imbue her with that same flat quippy personality that characterizes most Marvel heroes as a buffer to this, and it is as transparently ineffective as you might guess. She’s still the dullest of the trio, and it’s clear the writers (and Marvel bosses) have no idea exactly what to do with her. She brings to the movie its really cheap drama, that is both instilled with a sense of gravity and glossed over for its less favourable implications. Her guilt over the devastation she’s caused and need to do right is very one-note, the movie’s pacing is such that there’s no space to extract anything foundational or meaningful out of it.
This movie’s runtime was likely manufactured as a promotional tactic, and in response to the criticism that these movies can get too long. But The Marvels is clearly a longer movie squeezed into its tighter length. Every beat comes precisely but jarringly -it’s absurd and a little bit callous how with a very calculated set of shots and a quick succession of plot points, a genocide is played out within minutes of Kamala meeting her hero -in just as brief a time she is disillusioned by her. And the resolution to that needs to be swept by too so that the three can have a rapport going into the movie’s strangest and only bold creative choice: a planet where the people communicate entirely through song and dance. Though even this concept is too much distinct and challenging for Marvel that the movie feels obliged to walk it back almost as soon as it’s introduced. They would much rather subject the audience to a CG-articulated cat-wrangling set not at all cleverly to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Memories”, than write and showcase musical numbers of their own.
It’s clear the film is flailing about in an effort to retain that audience Marvel has been losing the past few years. There’s an air of desperation to its quips and comedy (more than other Marvel films, this one makes liberal use of lampshading -rarely a good sign), its action scenes, its passes at authentic character drama. And very little of that lands as the same old problems rain down. The movie’s villain, played by Zawe Ashton (incidentally the wife of fellow Marvel baddie Tom Hiddleston) is as dull and as dry as they come. The visual language, though striving for something kinetic, remains tepid, and that impulse to build out the universe still often overtakes any semblance of a singular plot. It’s the major motivator of the last of several stakes that clumsily colour the climax; and while the movie can be vaguely followed without the prior context of the Disney+ shows (I didn’t watch Secret Invasion, but I doubt I missed much), it does expect a certain level of investment built in, which the movie utterly falls short of, especially in how much more thin both Kamala and Monica are forced to be by the requirements of this script. And the new wider universe developments that are teased at the end are exceedingly boring from a creative standpoint -again speaking to the pressure Marvel is under to cater to its base as nakedly as possible when they have virtually no ideas left.
DaCosta’s seeming ambivalence in the aftermath of making this movie (at least as it has been portrayed in the media) is curiously reflective of Marvel’s own towards the movie that bears their brand name front and centre -something which makes it easy to see the movie as a microcosm of the larger studio and its creative issues. It’s not good when even those folks in charge seem intent on burying this movie, which is honestly one of the more embarrassing the studio has put out, even on just a structural level. It is a spinning-of-wheels in movie form. And now more than ever this enterprise looks in dire need of an overhaul -perhaps the only thing that can save it, if it is in any way even worth saving.

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