‘The Marvels’: The MCU’s Dim Light

For people gleefully predicting the end of the MCU, ‘The Marvels’ will be a disappointment. It will also disappoint anyone who’s hoping Marvel will triumph over its haters and recapture the magic of the most profitable and popular film franchise in history. The Marvels is not a franchise savior. But despite its weird tonal shifting and hard-to-follow plot, it’s also not a total franchise destroyer. There’s enough fun and good will within its confines to keep the MCU afloat for another few months.

THE MARVELS ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Nia DaCosta
Written by:  Nia DaCosta, Megan McDonnell, Elissa Karasik
Starring: Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris, Iman Vellani, Samuel L. Jackson
Running time: 105 mins

One would think that Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers, or Captain Marvel, is the main character of this installment, and she’s certainly the most well-known actor on display other than Samuel L. Jackson, whose once-noble Nick Fury the movie reduces to a comic side character mostly doomed to interacting with CGI cat-aliens. But the emotional, and fun, heart of the movie belongs to Iman Vellani, who plays Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan. She’s the first and last protagonist we see, and the movie is really about her journey to becoming a real superhero rather than a teen side-project. She’s just as charismatic and fun in The Marvels as she was in her Disney+ TV show, and she brings a gee-whiz excitement to the proceedings of a franchise where the players increasingly feel like they’re paycheck-collecting.

If you haven’t been paying attention to recent MCU products, the story of The Marvels will make little sense. Kamala Khan’s narrative begins where her TV show left off. The third major character, Monica Rambeau, is an astronaut of sorts with some weird light powers that she obtained during the run of ‘WandaVision.’ She’s also Carol Danvers’s de facto niece, which you wouldn’t know unless you had seen ‘Captain Marvel’. Teyonah Paris can certainly hold the screen as Monica, but she suffers from an even worse case of super-humorlessness than Brie Larson does, which leaves Vellani to do a lot of the “let’s go, team!” heavy lifting.

The plot revolves, again, around the Kree/Skrull alien war, which received an incredible amount of leaden play in Marvel’s recent dreadful ‘Secret Invasion’ show and has never been as fun on screen as it was in the comic books. So we already don’t care much. The bad guy is a female Kree who is trying to return light and water and air to the Kree homeworld, which Captain Marvel damaged when she destroyed the artificial intelligence that runs the Kree civilization. I have seen every minute of every Marvel show and movie, and even I have no idea what I just typed. That’s how little these plots matter at this point.

From a kinetic point of view, the light-based powers of our three protagonists end up getting entangled, which leads to some nifty fight tricks where they zap back and forth among deep space, a station somewhere between the Earth and the moon, and, most exotically, Jersey City, where Kamala lives with her kvetchy but amusing family. That is all relatively enjoyable to watch. And then The Marvels head off into the universe on a spaceship, most strangely to a waterworld where people can only communicate through song and dance, which leads Captain Marvel to dress like a Disney Princess and sing a song with a handsome prince. Yes, this really does happen, calling vaguely to mind Brie Larson’s musical numbers in Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, and also Beauty and the Beast.

At some point, the movie realizes that this is insane and cringe, so it cuts to a sequence where cat alien-monsters babies emerge from throbbing red brain-eggs. ‘Wild Strawberries’, this is not. The good guys and bad guys fight, the heroes utter catchphrases, they heal old wounds, and everything literally climaxes in a scene where one of the characters saves the universe while looking like she’s having a light-based orgasm.

All the while, you find yourself watching Kamala Khan, thinking that the MCU should really center itself around her, she’s the only one who seems to be connecting with the audience and enjoying herself. And at the end of The Marvels, that appears to be what’s happening. The last five minutes feature some fun guest stars that possibly portend well for the future, or maybe don’t matter at all. It might be too late, because the lights are dimming fast.