We’re now 33 movies deep into this thing. That’s right, “The Marvels” is the 33rd big-screen installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not to mention the nine different television series and two TV specials on Disney+, so if you haven’t jumped on the MCU train yet, forget it.
What made the MCU movies so great for their first decade is you didn’t necessarily have to watch every movie to understand what was going on, and there were no TV shows to watch in addition to the two or three trips to the movie theater to keep up.
But now, especially since COVID-19 delayed several productions and got others re-written and released out of order, even someone who has seen every single movie and TV episode as I did is having difficulty keeping everything straight.
That’s the biggest problem with “The Marvels” — it’s not just a sequel to “Captain Marvel” from 2019, but a continuation of last year’s “Ms. Marvel” miniseries as well. And if you truly want to be fully in the loop, you should probably have also watched “WandaVision,” “Thor: Love & Thunder” and “Secret Invasion” while you’re at it. Sounds like a lot of homework for little reward, and you’d be correct.
Carol Danvers (portrayed by Bree Larson) — a.k.a. Captain Marvel — has reclaimed her identity from the tyrannical Kree and taken revenge on the Supreme Intelligence, but the unintended consequences see her shouldering the burden of a destabilized universe.
When her duties send her to an anomalous wormhole linked to a Kree revolutionary, her powers become entangled with two other superheroes — Capt. Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), who is the daughter of Danvers’ best friend, and Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), a.k.a. Ms. Marvel, a high schooler from New Jersey and Danvers’ biggest fan.
Recruited by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) to investigate the wormholes, the newly formed Marvels travels across the galaxy to stop the ruthless warrior behind them — if only the superheroes’ powers getting entangled and causing them to switch places didn’t make it so difficult.
At a brisk one-hour, 45-minute runtime, this is one of the shortest MCU films yet, and while movies pushing two-and-a-half hours or longer aren’t necessary either, this one needed some more time to breathe and develop its characters. Yes, if you’ve seen all the previous movies and shows, there is already plenty of emotional weight behind them, but if you haven’t, you’re probably not going to care when the movie swiftly moves from set piece to set piece.
The saving grace of this entire thing is Vellani, whose Kamala Khan is not only the best part of the MCU at this point, but she should probably be taking over from Kevin Fiege as the one running Marvel Studios. Vellani is the only one who seems to understand the assignment at this point and isn’t just phoning in another easy paycheck, helped by her real-life fangirl bleeding into the character — she reminds me of so many of our feelings when the MCU began over a decade ago.
When it comes to shortcomings in “The Marvels,” I don’t blame director Nia DaCosta — she and many others have repeatedly said it’s Fiege’s child and they’re just babysitting for a couple hours. But Disney’s questionable track record with other franchise missteps in recent years, such as “Star Wars,” “Indiana Jones,” the support both financially and giving crews enough time to let the creators actually create is limited. The CGI in this film isn’t great, but that’s no surprise when the company squashes any conversation from the animators asking for more time and resources to make the special effects look great.
Although this was a sour note for the MCU to end this year on after a fairly disappointing run of productions, there may be a silver lining. “Deadpool 3” is the only MCU film slated to come out in 2024. The last time we only got one Marvel movie in a calendar year was 2010 — not counting COVID-19 canceling 2020’s lineup with only an X-Men spin-off dumped on streaming — and the success the studio experienced from 2011 through 2019 was unprecedented. Fingers crossed.