#The Marvels review

[californiannostalgia]

Things I Loved About The Marvels

SPACE. FAMILY. TEAMWORK. INTENSIVE FANGIRLING. (An intimidatingly charismatic villain. Also fuck colonialism.) BLACK GIRL MAGIC. MAN-EATING CATS. TRAINING MONTAGE. BEST FUCKING ACTION SEQUENCES EVER.

COSMIC SPACE POWERS!!!! GORGEOUS BREATHTAKING AWE-INSPIRING

I had so much fun oh my god

(also young avengers is gonna be so funny, it's gonna be like young justice or some shit)

this is such a tight, well-made film. holy shit. I love superhero movies.

[agentem]

Emily watches "The Marvels"

I liked it. I see why critics say it is "disjointed". It's because it is three stories (Carol, Monica and Kamala's, duh) and it has to cut between them. And I do feel like there are [footage not found] situations that might be left out on purpose?

The familial relationship between the Khans is the real highlight, imo.

Anyway, if you care about the X-Men coming to the MCU, then this one is important.

[annachum]

Okay my review of The Marvels ( spoiler warnings ahead!! )

. THE MOVIE IS SO AWESOME I SCREAMED I SCRUMPT IT ALSO RADIATES FEMININE POWER MESSAGES AAAAAAAAAHHH

. Kamala finally getting to fight alongside Carol. Bless

. YESSSSS MONICA CAROL AND KAMALA TRIPLE FIGHT!!!!

. Dar Benn IS......unhinged. Yeesh. She kinda reminds me of Maleficent and Queen Grimmhilde in some ways

. So Dar Benn just foes around annihilating people AND resources across the galaxy all for Hala?!?!? Like, I get your devotion to your home planet, lady, but PLS

. Okay turns out Ael Dann ( Dar Benn's older twin brother and son of Ronan and Una Rogg ) died in the Kree Civil War ( which is basically a bloody toss up between the extended Kree Imperial Household and their factions over who gets to be Supreme Ruler of the Kree after Ronan died. Talk about Gamr of Thrones like situation here.

. Prince Yan slaying and being handsome and fly as always ~ 🤩🤩🤩🤩🥺🥺

. AAAAAAAHHH MONICA WAKES UP IN AN X MEN TIMELINE?!?!?! AAAAAAHHH

. Let's just say Dar Benn's outcome is literally a result of her being overcome with vengeance and greed

. Ofc the Skrulls won't trust the Kree especially with the Kree Skrull War going on for DECADES

. Well at least now the planets affected by the Kree are recovering and rebuilding right now

. Srsly Aladna is basically like when Oz, Wonderland and Disney's Aladdin verse somehow mash it up together and produce that

. The Aladanaans do have sick sirenic voices and musical related powers tho

. The Aladnaan fashion has some nods to the fashions in Silly Symphonies, Jupiter Ascending and Dune

. The Multiverses are being mentioned

. FLERKEN ARMY TO THE RESCUE!!! ( with Memory from Cats played in the background )

. Kamala's family moments are just - bless 🤩🤩🤩🥺🥺🥺🥺

. So the bangles ARE indeed from the Hindu Myth Planes. OH BOY I BET the Hindu Myth Planes be having had beef with the Kree over misuse of the bangles, really

. ALL IN ALL ITS SUCH AN AWESOME MOVIE!!!

🤩🤩🤩🤩

[biblioflyer]

A Marvelsous Film: Review & Analysis

I wound up being enormously pleased with The Marvels. Much of what I had on my wishlist for a Captain Marvel sequel was satisfied.

Three core things I had in mind for the character were transitioning away organically from the “cold” and traumatized Kree super soldier, to be presented with a challenge that couldn’t be dealt with simply by punching her way through it, and to be more firmly embedded into the MCU as a leader and team player.

A Problem That Can’t be Punched Until it Goes Away

As I’ve discussed previously, Carol has the Superman problem. Which is how do you tell a story about someone who is functionally invulnerable in a convincing way? 

The Marvels solves that problem by making Carol’s power something of a liability and giving her a couple of teammates, including one very enthusiastic but in over her head teenage sidekick. It also presents Carol with the classic Marvel superhero growing pains: superpowers don’t come with superwisdom.

I think it was a nice balancing act to acknowledge that time had passed so naturally Captain Marvel should not be precisely the same person she was when she first broke free of her Kree conditioning. However, a complete personality reversal would be confusing and jarring for audiences even if it would make sense.

The film also had to address where Carol had been all this time, including multiple instances of the world being in grave danger. So it solved the personality issue and the timeline concerns with one answer: overwork through guilt.

Carol used her newfound powers impulsively and it all went horribly wrong. There’s something of a parallel there to explore as well. When freed of their subordination to the Supreme Intelligence, the Kree also found themselves not really knowing what to do with their freedom and using violence to resolve social tensions because that’s what they’d been conditioned to do.

Now the temptation might arise to ask the question, “Well what did Carol think was going to happen?”

Keep in mind that Carol was abducted by space aliens in the 90s. A time of innocence and naive optimism about geopolitics. A time when it was a lot easier to blame sociopathic tyrants for the problems of their societies and Carol was presumably busy in space trying to find a new home for the Skrulls, getting into political marriages, and rescuing space kittens from space trees while the United States was accumulating the many, many years of painful experience with what comes next after a tyrant is deposed with no realistic plan for rebuilding.

Turns out the experience of being under a tyrant leaves a mark on a society that doesn’t resolve itself in a day. It can also be somewhat problematic to be processing that trauma and learning how to exercise personal autonomy without automatically feeling existentially threatened by someone who is exercising their autonomy while there’s a bunch of unaccounted for weapons floating around in your previously highly militarized society.

There’s a little bit of Francis Fukuyama in Carol Danvers. But only a little. Unlike Fukuyama, Carol realizes her mistake and is desperate to find a way to fix it, rather than refusing to admit her instincts might have been a bit off.

I’d like to think there’s a not so subtle bit of symbolism in the resolution to the Kree arc too. Using overwhelming force without wisdom perpetuates suffering and violence. However, with vast power also comes the ability to create and heal rather than merely destroy. Utilizing power in this way does require compassion and imagination. 

Compassion is key because the Kree had long ago stopped being a credible threat to Carol, at least until one of them got magic bangles. Recognizing this isn’t straightforward though! 

When people react poorly to you wherever you happen to be, it definitely seems threatening! So one might imagine it was a challenge for Carol to stop acting reflexively, and start thinking about longer-term solutions than simply punching her way through yet another Kree platoon and another and another.

Coming Out of My Cage and Doing Just Fine

That was probably the stuff most worth spending a lot of words on. The rest is just scattered stuff I appreciated.

Since I was just on the subject of breaking cycles of violence, let's talk about the Asgardians welcoming the Skrulls for a moment.

Talk about a heel-to-hero turn. Under Odin in prehistory, Asgard was a brutal conqueror with Hela as its weapon of mass destruction. In the modern era, it seemed to have adopted a posture of guarantor of security for at least the Nine Realms, a responsibility Loki 1.0 was not overly attentive to.

Post Ragnarok, what we’ve learned between Love and Thunder and now The Marvels is that the remnant of Asgard appears to be a refuge for interstellar and interdimensional diasporas. No doubt in a Post-Secret Invasion world with its apparent Skrull pogrom, this may wind up being a bit contentious.

I do hope we get a scene of King Valkyrie delivering some Leonidas-style dialogue along the lines of “come and take them” except, y’know, this time in service to protecting refugees instead of not even slightly veiled Western chauvinism. At least in 300. Although even the history of the Persian War is complicated by some Greek city-states fighting alongside the Persians, I digress.

No doubt ships aplenty were launched by Valkyrie's tenderness towards Carol. Perhaps a small bit of consolation for the fans after Jane Foster x Valkyrie didn’t happen and then further complicated by Foster being a little dead.

Shipping ain’t really my scene, but this is one I could definitely nod along with on account of how well the characters and their histories mesh. It does make one wonder if Valkyrie was one of those unnamed people who were part of Carol’s crew prior to The Marvels. It's fun to think about at least. We know Valkyrie wasn’t blipped so she could have spent some time running around as Asgard’s representative helping Carol put out fires. It's a bit harder to imagine Scrapper 142 era Valkyrie and Captain Marvel getting along quite so well and it's implied (explicitly stated even?) that Sakaar is extremely difficult to leave, although that too is not beyond consideration.

Never Meet Your Heroes, Unless You’re a Relentless Cinnamon Bun

Cards on the table, I’ve never been a big fan of the YA genre as literature, TV, or movies. Even when I was a teen / young adult, I found stuff that was explicitly oriented towards that audience and heavily featured characters in that demographic to be almost unwatchable by virtue of just how much the genre relies on “relatable” themes like love triangles, profound awkwardness, and other teen story “cliches.” I’m not saying I was too cool for these things to reflect my own reality, if anything it was my own awkwardness that made it challenging to watch or read about these themes and still does up to a point.

Kamala Khan did win me over in the Ms. Marvel series in spite of a bit of curmudgeonly skepticism going in. Yes, it did cringe family drama and super cringe romantic triangle cliches, but with enough warmth and charisma that it disarmed me.

So I was definitely anticipating what it would be like when Kamala Khan actually got to meet her idol. And it did not disappoint!

It didn’t disappoint in the sense that Iman Vellani continued to embody the hysterical starstruck superfan magnificently (and kudos to her and her snark about Filoni calling the MCU Earth 616.) 

Yet when called for, the character was able to set aside fandom and embrace (literally) her idol not as a specimen of perfection, but as a flawed, insecure human being who kind of needed someone to see her for a whole person rather than The Annihilator or a glowing weapon to use against Earth’s enemies. Which feels like an allegory for the real-life fandom’s relationship with the characters and creative processes involved in the MCU.

This, when taken along with working through the uncomfortable reunion with Monica, serves to complete the next phase of Carol’s arc begun in Captain Marvel. I had a suspicion that this would be the case: that Carol being forced to rely on others would break through the trust issues and reserve. It’s absolutely a trope but it's not a bad trope when well executed.

My only real complaint with this aspect of the story is that it felt like Rambeau didn’t have all that many scenes to herself. Vellani is a natural scene-stealer and that is in a sense what Ms. Marvel is there for: to be the comic relief that wouldn’t be a natural fit for Monica or Carol and to keep the story from becoming too much of a downer.

A curmudgeonly opinion might say that Ms. Marvel’s relentless bubbliness steps all over the emotional labor that is owed to repair the relationship between Monica and Carol, but just the same I can see an alternate cut where the film just becomes too angsty. 

So I’m glad in the end that Carol and Monica are reasonable people able to take responsibility, in Carol’s case, and recognize that there’s a person who is carrying literally astronomical burdens with all too human shoulders, in Monica’s case but also mirroring to some degree Kamala. In the end, it seems like Kamala and Monica wind up with a better relationship with Carol for having recognized that Captain Marvel, symbol, has limitations that are invisible when one is only seeing the raw power at her command.

The Child Soldier Elephant in the Room

Remember when I said the YA genre makes me uncomfortable most of the time? Young Avengers, conceptually, is one of those times.

I’m cautiously optimistic though. There has been some self-awareness demonstrated throughout the MCU that teen superheroes are a bit of an ethical conundrum. On a meta level - the Doylist perspective if you will, teen superheroes are all about wish fulfillment. The desire of everyone at every age but especially as a teen / young adult is fierce to feel empowered to Make a Difference. 

Disempowerment wounds every soul but no soul feels it as acutely as the young who haven’t built up scar tissue and cynicism accumulated through the frustration and disappointment of trying to grab hold of complex systems with a lot of inertia and bend them to your will.

So far be it from me to poo poo the idea that young adults should be denied their inspiration and wish fulfillment stories. Star Trek after all is, when it's at its best, wish fulfillment for intellectually curious humanist adults and I reserve the right to raise hell every time cynicism and pessimism intrude on my dopamine supply!

Narratively though, I do think it would be irresponsible to not acknowledge the moral complexities of child superheroes.

So far, there has been a relatively decent attempt to walk the tightrope. To try to meet the needs of the narrative while not putting too thick of a whitewash on the realities.

Intriguingly enough, in Spider-Man Far From Home, it's the villain who points out the obvious: it's not fair for Peter to be carrying the weight of the responsibility “Fury” (Talos) is placing on him.

Clint also repeatedly tries to keep Kate Bishop from getting roped any further into his problems using similar arguments, but also out of an understandable desire to keep his failures and problems from being someone else’s to clean up.

So what does this have to do with The Marvels?

Spoiler alert! The mid-credits scene is an amusing callback to Nick Fury’s visit to Tony Stark at the end of Iron Man to talk about the Avengers Initiative. To be frank, knowing what I know about Iman Vellani, if you told me she wrote this scene herself, I’d believe you.

Anyway, she ambushes Kate Bishop to pitch her, with barely restrained enthusiasm, about forming a team of “child” superheroes. Kate wryly observes that she’s 23 but she gets the point and seems receptive.

So my idea to try to keep this from going too off the rails would be for the Young Avengers to be more of a training cadre to help young “enhanced” to master their abilities rather than an active superhero team. They would naturally find themselves in a situation where the “adult” superheroes are unavailable to solve a problem in a timely manner.

Kind of like the conceit that Charles Xavier’s School for the Gifted is in fact a school and not a training ground for child soldiers, Young Avengers rightfully should not feature the likes of Nick Fury intentionally sending the Young Avengers into harm’s way except as a last resort.

Having said that, I am now looking forward to it in a way I really wasn’t before because I now feel that Iman Vellani absolutely can carry a film, especially with strong personalities like Hailee Steinfeld to play off of. I’m still crossing my fingers for Kid Loki to make an appearance too.

[concise-cyan]

Watched The Marvels aka Captain Marvel 2 today and it is bad. Honestly, I'm really disappointed because I wanted it to be good because I like Brie a lot as Captain Marvel and I want to see good movies.

Reasons why it was bad:

It is disjointed. It's a 105 min runtime (thankfully) but the scenes don't really connect and it's very clear that stuff has been edited out. I'm not saying that putting the stuff back in would have made it better because fundamentally it's a writing problem in that the villain is weak, the chemistry between the three leads isn't developed enough, and the whole plot is so basic and paper thin that it's basically like a video game fetch quest.

Some of the light hearted moments/attempts at humor I found really cringe. I don't know if it's because I'm much older than I was when I watched the first marvel films (but then again, I've rewatched some lately and Tony's quips are still very fun), but the singing planet stuff makes me roll my eyes and the flerkin kittens + Memory from Cats scene makes me question - who approved this?!

Needs more character development and backstory. Why is Monica upset with Carol? Why is Dar-Benn (the villain) angry at Carol? What happened to the Kree planet? What's with the Skrull colonies? It's like a whole movie's (not giving Disney ideas but) been skipped. When Monica forgave Carol for leaving, I felt nothing. The best parts of the early Marvel movies were the character development of our heroes and the chemistry between leads and this movie had none of that.

Also, they used a lot of flashbacks that were just scenes directly taken from other movies/tv shows - like Marvel has money, why is it giving me CW network show budget episodes?

It might be time to just give up on any Marvel properties unless they start getting reviewed back in the 80s/90s again on rotten tomatoes.

Some good things I guess:

Kamala's family and Kamala

Brie Larsen is so fit (also does anyone else get lesbian vibes from Captain Marvel?)

Teyonnah (Monica's actress) is so pretty

Zawe (Dar-Benn) really hamming it up with those facial expressions as the villain (fun! too bad the writing/editing is sucking right now)

[hollywoodhandle]

‘The Marvels’ Review: A Decent Entry To The MCU

Many people share your concern or indifference about the MCU’s current situation. The MCU has faced a lot of negative press due to the writers & actors strike, the poor treatment and compensation of the VFX Artists, and the declining quality of their recent projects. It is fair to say that the MCU has had better days. The Marvels only adds to the worries. With reports of multiple rewrites,…

[spryfilm]

Movie review: “The Marvels” (2023)

[afabstract]

The Marvels Review - Flerkens Steal The Spotlight

Captain Marvel teams up with super-fan Ms. Marvel and her niece, Captain Rambeau, to fight Kree leader Dar-Benn, who comes to possess a legendary band.

Directed by Nia DaCosta, the 2023 fantasy-action film “The Marvels” is a lot like “Thor Love and Thunder” – funny, chaotic, but way more random. The story follows Kree leader Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), who gets her hand on a quantum band, an ancient artifact with the power to manipulate space and time. As Dar-Been begins to exploit her newfound powers, it leads to unexpected results, prime among…

[esichime]

My ★★★ review of The Marvels (2023) on Letterboxd:

[joesatmosfere]

I made my Marvels review a short. That’s all the time it deserves. Share as a warning ⚠️ to people you care about! 😎

[notearsnora]

Best WICKED review EVER.

[agentem]

Yay! I was nervous. Apparently the main criticism is it's a bit disjointed and "too wacky" but I am on board for wackiness at this point in my life.

[niyana-the-ambiguous-mobian]

So I finally watched Puss in Boots 2....

[quinton-reviews]

My biggest Garfield collectible white whales:

Garfield Zodiac GEMINI statue

Garfield Charm Danglers (Jon & Nermal edition)

Superhelden Agenda '88-'89 (Dutch Marvel book)

McDonald's Employee Garfield (green edition (prize at franchise locations))

[wormzandgutz]

I'm a better character designer than the entirety of the overwatch team /joke

[bridoesotherjunk]

Okay, so it's been a handful of days since I've seen Venom 3.. and I think I've finally got my thoughts together.

This review will have spoilers, so it will go under the cut.

these are all my opinions, so don't take my word as gospel or anything...

Anyone who knows me and my blog knows how much I've loved these movies since 2018, so to see me not ranting about the third Venom movie should be evidence enough how I feel.

I... don't feel like this was a satisfying conclusion to the Venom franchise. I really feel like there was so much more that could have been done, and should have been, instead of what we got.

I truly feel that introducing Knull into the story was a mistake. The first 2 films were so much smaller scale. Expanding all the way to the fucking symbiote god after only having done Carnage just felt like such a massive leap. And they really didn't do much with him anyway.

It felt like they included Knull because they were obligated to. Like Sony made them in order to have a weird spin off involving Knull trying to kill stuff. I don't know. He didn't do much besides tease future movies where he's the villain again. And that's kind of boring...

I will sound so narcissistic saying this, but I truly feel that the story I came up with, where the villains of Venom 3 are former Life Foundation employees angry at Eddie for ruining their lives, made way more sense. In terms of scale, you know? Much less "huge universal threat" and more of the small scale "threat to Eddie and Venom specifically" type story. Even Riot, being a threat to the Earth, was smaller scale than Knull. Knull is just too much. Too big. Too unfocused. It felt like too wide of a net. It felt generic, i hate to say it. It just felt like every other dumb ass gritty movie where the bad guy wants to destroy all life as we know it. (And quite frankly, he could have been taken out of the movie and not much would have changed. Venom and Eddie could have been hunted by the xenophages for any number of reasons.)

The part of the movie that I enjoyed most was the beginning. The part that felt like Venom. Where we saw Eddie and Venom working in sync to free those dogs. I loved that. I loved seeing how far the two of them have come and how well they work together. .. seeing their journey in a montage later? That felt... lackluster. After seeing them literally working together just an hour earlier in the movie, it felt kind of cheap. The way the story ended for these two didn't feel like a victory. It felt like the Avengers Endgame "well we gotta get rid of this character because their contract is up" situation.

The movie was definitely a fun time. I enjoyed myself watching it. But I was left feeling a sense of "That's it?" That I haven't felt since Avengers Endgame.

I'm happy that Tom Hardy got to do these movies. I absolutely will forever adore the first 2. They're fun, they're goofy, they're gay, and I love them. .. but this third one just... yeah. I'm disappointed.

I will always love Venom. That much is not going to change. I love these two gay losers and I'm so happy I got to have them in my life. They brought me so much joy, and so much brainrot, and I will miss the fuck out of them.