One of Marvel’s unheralded strengths is how Kevin Feige’s outfit has often managed to make their metric tonnages of lore digestible for the viewer without requiring fucking homework. It is a hard thing to sustain a franchise for some 30 entries and much more so to not outsource a lot of the contextual detail to tie-in comics or novels (and though some have existed, they’ve never had a ton of impact on anything we see on screen) despite how the temporal gap between movies provides a fertile ground for Expanded Universe content. The obvious joke is that those 30 movies just naturally supplied it, but asking an interested audience to go to the theater three or four times a year isn’t the same as asking them to head to Barnes and Noble and invest practical effort or money in their “education.” The original comics have always been there for those who cared enough.
But as the Chapek-era Disney began its attempt to corner the market on AAA streaming, that aspect of the MCU began to fall by the wayside. They were kind of minor, initially saved for post-credits sequences — why the fuck is Julia-Louise Dreyfus in any of these movies? – or for introducing characters who would later go on to have their own shows, presumably like Riri Williams will. One can almost connect this with Feige’s growing absence as a quality control man, spread thin across any number of projects placed in the pipeline that required his attention. This has culminated in Nia DaCosta’s The Marvels, which is functionally illegible to people who haven’t watched Wandavision, Secret Invasion, and Ms. Marvel (as well as others that will remain unspoiled) in addition to each theatrical release that’s dropped since the last time we saw Brie Larson in a non-cameo role.
This would be a minor gripe – one that easily could be dismissed by MCU stans as the kind of dismissive horseshit that critics who can both recite Bela Tarr’s filmography by chapter and verse and have made the time investment to watch Out 1 pass off on things that aren’t genuinely that hard to understand dish out to art they don’t deem worthy – if not for the fact that the movie is roughly 96 minutes long. It feels like there are roughly 40 minutes of the movie missing, all of which probably contains additional context for people who haven’t dived into the Disney+ series (or were warded off by unflattering reviews) and all of those little character moments that they liked about Marvel movies in the first place. Now, I’m not arguing for the three-hour runtime that has become commonplace in the genre, and, after all, we’re in this mess thanks to Disney’s bid to eliminate all of their competition from the multiplex on opening weekend by bloating their movies (if a theater owner wants to show Black Panther II a certain number of times a day, they’re gonna have to leverage all of those eighteen screens in order to do so).
But, again, that runtime is artificially short: If you don’t know who Kamala Khan is, what her family dynamics are like, how Monica Rambeau got her powers, or where Nick Fury has been (and god help you if you’ve only seen Far From Home), you will be almost totally and utterly lost, because the movie assumes that you already know, like them and already have plenty of reasons to give a damn about what they’re up to here. This approach might have worked with another hero, but for whatever reason, Feige chose the one with the least amount of depth to act as the nucleus of this dynamic.
“Depth,” perhaps, is the wrong word. Carol Danvers (Larson) has been, in Feige’s hands, almost chronically underdeveloped: her first movie was about her trying to understand her place in the universe and becoming a hero after being mindwiped by the Kree Empire, who sent her out to be a jackbooted thug persecuting the peaceful shapeshifters known as the Skrulls. Since she reclaimed her identity and kicked Annette Benning’s ass, she’s popped on screen here or there, punched Thanos in the face once or twice, and presumably had great adventures trying to heal the wounds between the Kree and the Skrulls. She starts out the movie here essentially in the exact same place we left her in Captain Marvel, wandering the galaxy, looking vaguely troubled and bored by the terrible memories of what she’d done under mind-control and of the life she had as an Air Force captain back in Louisiana. I’m not totally sure of the chronology here, but some eight in-universe years have elapsed since she first revealed herself to the Avengers after Thanos snapped half of the universe out of existence. Couple that with the decades she spent wandering the Galaxy trying to find the Skrulls a new home, and you have what genuinely appears to be a totally static character: the most important development within her story has been a haircut. Yet she still hasn’t found the time to talk with her goddaughter, now a Captain of her own right, working with Fury on a space station monitoring interplanetary travel, or a small-time hero who is most likely infringing on what kind of trademark she has on the Captain Marvel identity if one could even actually lay claim to such a thing.
As such, when the baddie shows up – a Kree who’s after a magic gauntlet that can potentially restore her planet’s sun, one that just so happens to be an exact duplicate of the one Kamala wears – Carol finds herself in the midst of a resurgent Kree crisis and seemingly can kick enough ass to handle everything on her own. That is, at least until she tries to throw a punch and finds herself teleported across the galaxy to Kamala’s bedroom, trading places with a hero who has powers that are kind of like hers and absolutely nothing like the ones Khan has in the comics. Kamala, meanwhile, finds herself in Kree space, surrounded by baddies, but when she throws a punch, she’s suddenly in a spacesuit, looking at Nick Fury, with Monica now fighting the Kree soldiers with her also-similar powerset. Cue the Portal jokes.
Turns out the three are gonna have to work together as soon as they can get to the same place, and one gets a sense as to why Feige and company chose this storyline: instead of developing Carol, they chose to add two to try and see if they could somehow use all three of them to fill the gaping hole where a single strong one might have been. But attempting to make these three characters adhere is rougher going than it should be, and it comes at the expense of Carol, who, in not seeing Monica for all of these years, looks like a real asshole, and to Kamala, who is essentially an over-enthusiastic audience hype-man, point at exactly what any given fan should cheer at in the hopes that they mimic her excitement. Given that their time together is so abridged, their bonding never quite comes together as it is intended, and so you’re essentially watching two stoics and the Adoring Fan from Bethesda’s Oblivion or Starfield wandering through a plot that is both aggressively complex and way too thinly spread.
All of the other trademarks of post-Endgame Marvel remain. The VFX is rough for a movie this expensive, and the action is as incomprehensible as it normally is, made even worse by the looping, teleporting predicament that our heroes have found themselves in. The stakes are hideously high but frustratingly low and are often treated with a kind of flippancy by everyone involved, though the characters don’t get along well enough for the theory of the villain just serving as a way of interrupting the cast’s good time to have any merit here. Even worse, it feels wholly aimless: At least the original Captain Marvel was intended to serve as a lead-in to Endgame, and even if it didn’t have a huge bearing on that story, it still felt purposeful. I won’t reveal what The Marvels sets up here, but it’s genuinely frustrating, continuing the path of naval-gazing that the company embarked upon once they’d fully conquered the multiplex.
I will say that out of all the young filmmakers sucked into the Marvel machine, DaCosta does, at the very least, do some decent work with the things that seem to be totally in her control. A digression to a musical planet – yes, where everyone sings – is colorful and vibrant, if kind of disappointing, and a lengthy subplot involving Carol’s not-cat cat Goose is genuinely funny and clever. The culmination of that subplot is perhaps the closest Marvel has come to properly imitating the wit that James Gunn brought to his corner of the “cosmic” area of the MCU. I wasn’t a huge fan of DaCosta’s Candyman, but her work here within the system is more than enough to make me excited for whatever stuff she does next, either in it or outside of it.
No, the problem here is with Disney. If there’s ever an argument for the “strong executive” theory to be made, Bob Iger would probably represent it: He positioned the company to unparalleled heights, to the point that film nerds legitimately worried if, like in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, we’d wind up calling movies “Disneys” at some point in the next hundred years. But it is significantly easier to conquer than it is to govern, and even with all the black swan events that hit the company when Bob Chapek took over accounted for, a maintenance strategy looked as if it were never a priority. Whatever hard work went into establishing the company as a go-to source for popular multiplex fare was quickly undone by the pace that they’d established and the ballooning costs involved in making content for additional and unanticipated revenue streams. Chapek came to power in a world that was assumed to be going all-digital, and once that turned out to be impossible to profit off thanks to interest rate hikes and shell-game con that masqueraded as the economics of streaming, his dreams of a kind of virtual vertical integration turned out to be nightmares. We’re still living with the consequences of that, no one more so than Iger, who returned to the company to try to right the ship, undermined by the fact that years of Chapek’s content was already in the can or at least in pre-production.
They triple-downed on the things that they knew drew eyes without really understanding exactly what made them tick, and we shouldn’t be surprised that we wound up with a movie like The Marvels as a result: A feature produced simply because the slate required another Marvel tentpole and Disney+ subscription numbers needed some juice (we can be grateful for one thing: At least you didn’t have to actually go to a Disney park to get some key detail, as much as Chapek might have dreamed of the possibility.). At this point, the SS Marvel isn’t just treading water: Its lower decks are actively taking it on, and one wonders if there’s enough fondness for the Fox properties that Feige and Iger haven’t exploited yet to ensure that it doesn’t sink.