Science Meets Fiction

Well, Marvel is back, and this time, it’s specifically The Marvels, starring Captain Marvel (whose movie I reviewed in 2019), Ms. Marvel (aka Kamala Khan, whose story premiered on Disney Plus last year) and Professor Marvel Monica Rambeau (Carol’s adoptive niece who refuses to use a codename). This time, the accidental team must fight a Kree warlord who is plundering planets for their natural resources. Also, their powers have been “entangled” so that they keep switching places with each other.

(As an aside, to save you the time, there is a mid-credits scene, but no post-credits scene.)

How did it go? I rate this movie the same as the first Captain Marvel: 4 out of 5.

But there’s more to it than that…

First off, I want to say this movie was fun. It was a lot more fun than Captain Marvel, which took itself a little too seriously (much like Carol herself, I dare say). The Marvels wasn’t the best writing–not bad by any means, but not the best (and don’t ask me about the science), but it was still good, and I had a lot of fun with it.

The second thing is that the original Captain Marvel committed one grave sin in my mind, which was the fact that the first twenty minutes were just plain confusing. When I watched it, I didn’t know what was going on or why I should care. They even removed the scene from the trailer where Carol was experimented on by the Kree, which would have helped explain things.

I mention that because I think The Marvels did fix that problem…but not for everyone. It fixed the problem for people like me who watched the Ms. Marvel Disney Plus miniseries. After seeing the miniseries, I knew what was going on in Jersey City; I was invested in the characters, and I think I enjoyed the movie a lot more because of it. But I worry that it would have been a lot more confusing if I hadn’t seen it. Who is this Kamala Khan kid whom SHIELD already seems to know about and who happens to have relevant powers? How did she get the other bangle? What’s the deal with her family? The miniseries covered all of that.

Okay, I looked, and I found a couple reviews saying you really don’t need to watch Ms. Marvel before The Marvels. The movie does a good enough job of explaining things, and I suppose that’s true. But I still think I enjoyed it a lot more being more familiar with the characters. (And it might have been even better if I had seen Monica in WandaVision, too.)

Even so, there was a lot to like about this movie. It had good character arcs for all three main characters. I thought it did joke horror better than Multiverse of Madness did. Monica’s line about a certain scene being fanfiction bait was brilliant. The mid-credits scene showed great potential for [SPOILERS].

And most of all, the ending had perhaps the best “passing of the torch” moment I’ve seen in the franchise since Spider-Man: Far From Home. I really hope we get to see more of that.

Sadly, The Marvels has not been doing well. In fact it’s had the worst opening weekend of any MCU movie ever. (Presumably other than the direct to Disney Plus releases.) Really, it’s kind of a perfect storm of problems. Part of it is Disney’s fault for having it be so tightly integrated with the Disney Plus series. Part of it is, I think, audience fatigue with the MCU. (In fact, I started writing a whole explanation of what I think are the structural flaws of the MCU post-Endgame before I realized it would need to be its own post.) And part of it is that The Marvels was uniquely disadvantaged in the MCU because the actors’ strike made promoting it more difficult.

And all that is a shame because even if it’s not the best, even if the MCU as a whole hasn’t been able to return to the heights it was at before, The Marvels deserves better than that. Like I said, I enjoyed it. Yes, it was a popcorn flick, but it was a really fun one.

So, yes. You should go see it, and if you have time, you should watch Ms. Marvel, too.