The Marvels (2023)

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading the nonfiction book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, et al, and rewatching a few of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s greatest hits (Iron Man, The Winter Soldier) – all while keeping current with the second season of Loki and, yes, even the colorized version of Werewolf by Night on Disney+. And if you’ve been reading my reviews long enough, you’ll have sensed my genuine fatigue with all of this – not in keeping track of the superhero genre but in keeping up. I haven’t reviewed the Marvel shows because it’s too much content to watch and digest; to be honest, most of it elicits an “It’s Fine” shrug from me. There’s just so much of it these days, and very little of it is actually great. It’s beginning to feel a lot like homework.
 
And this weariness is Robinson’s whole point. In MCU, she and her co-authors observe that the low points in the 15-year franchise have been when the movies lose sight of what made Iron Man such a roaring success – not its CGI smash-fests or its breakneck sprint to a bigger picture, but the quiet character moments that “let us experience who they are as people and not legends” (352). In short, let superheroes be fun, let them be human, and make the world-building afterthought, not a forethought. (In other words, stop trying to make Kang happen.)
 
With this whirlwind reminder tour fresh in my head, I plunked down for a ticket to the 33rd MCU film, plugged my ears from the noisome and tiresome culture wars, and just prayed to God and Kevin Feige that The Marvels would be fun. Maybe prayers do get answered, because The Marvels is breezy and bright, weightless in a way against which we’ve been inoculated, and I smiled most of the way through.
 
Thanks to some super-quantum cosmic entanglement, Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) finds herself physically switching places with her niece Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) and superfan Kamala “Ms. Marvel” Khan (Iman Vellani). The unlikely trio soon learn that their predicament comes at the hands of Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), who is tearing worlds apart in a bid to restore the Kree Empire to its former glory.
 
While in one sense the Marvel Cinematic Universe set an unbeatable bar with Avengers: Endgame, its more recent outings have simultaneously lowered the bar. From the incoherent plotting of Spider-Man: No Way Home to the downright dismal proceedings of Thor: Love & Thunder, right up through four years and ten seasons of television shows, there’s very little of it I want to rewatch – and the very notion of a soup-to-nuts rewatch is so exhausting that I can barely stomach the sentence. In a world of Spider-Verses, who needs more Quantumania? So I went into The Marvels with my expectations fairly lowered, and the hurdle it needed to clear was whether I would begrudge it the time I spent with it.
 
The Marvels is far from perfect. It’s brief and a little thin, and its villain is the very definition of undercooked; Dar-Benn is not unlike her predecessors Ronan or Malekith, and the fact that you are likely rushing to Wikipedia says it all. Marvel has sometimes (often?) struggled to make its one-and-done villains sing, and Dar-Benn is no different. Her motives are clear enough, but the film doesn’t give Ashton much to do beyond scowl and brandish a hammer – a shame, since there is something at the core of this character worth exploring beyond a tepid and compulsory flashback sequence.
 
Brie Larson and Teyonah Parris are fine, too, getting to cut loose a bit more than they had in their respective debuts. The film truly shines, though, on the capable shoulders of Iman Vellani as Ms. Marvel. Where her Disney+ miniseries felt bogged down by cosmic nonsense and lifeless enemies, The Marvels wisely plays into Vellani’s unabashed affection for the genre and the giants with whom she shares the screen. When she squeaks with delight, we get it because we too would feel starstruck in the presence of Samuel L. Jackson (whose Nick Fury is so much more entertaining here than in the limp Secret Invasion). And in the film’s final scene, Vellani gets to riff on an iconic MCU moment, so effortlessly cool and nerdy that I literally applauded for how perfect it was for this character, this performer, to reenact that moment.
 
Indeed, the film is aptly titled The Marvels because it is that rare three-hander that gives the team a perfect balance of screen-time and responsibility for the plot. (The fact that it is handily stolen by Vellani is a testament to her dynamism as an actress.) An early action sequence introduces the dizzying effect of the three women swapping places, a unique setpiece that simultaneously moves the plot forward and the quickfire change of setting is brisk and – most importantly – entertaining. Much has been made of the film’s 01:45 runtime (the shortest in MCU history), and I have to say it felt refreshing; there wasn’t much bloat in the film, with very few moments that overstayed their welcome. 
 
When we rank all the Marvel movies, The Marvels isn’t at the bottom, but it’s nearer to the bottom of the middle. There was something alchemical about those early movies, especially the unsurpassed best, The Winter Soldier. No, The Marvels is nearer to something like Thor: The Dark World, meat-and-potatoes superheroics largely unconcerned with the wider tapestry. It’s fine, but it’s fun. It is not a film that I will rush to see again, but if we assess the MCU entries in terms of how long I smiled and how many times I laughed, I suspect The Marvels would register somewhere near the top ten.
 

The Marvels is rated PG-13 for “action/violence and brief language.” Directed by Nia DaCosta. Written by Nia DaCosta, Megan McDonnell, and Elissa Karasik. Based on the Marvel Comics. Starring Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris, Iman Vellani, Zawe Ashton, and Samuel L. Jackson.

Captain Marvel (2019)

Twenty-one movies in, the Marvel Cinematic Universe makes winning look effortless. As its original crop of Avengers begins to rotate out (so we assume), Marvel’s been marching toward Avengers: Endgame with the dually unenviable tasks of wrapping up a decade’s worth of stories while seeding another decade’s. With Captain Marvel, the franchise tries so many new things that it’s a wonder the film seems so comfortable, with its star Brie Larson feeling right at home as the hero who’s always already been woven into the Marvel tapestry.

Circa 1995, the Kree warrior Vers (Larson) crashlands on Earth, where she’s met by rising SHIELD agent Nicholas Fury (a de-aged Samuel L. Jackson). Fury is understandably baffled by her stories of intergalactic war and an invading army of Skrull shapeshifters, but it’s Vers who finds herself jumbled by impossible memories of a life on earth. As her commanding officer (Jude Law) sets out to rescue his protégé, the Skrull leader Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) searches earth for a device that will turn the tide in his peoples’ war against the Kree.

It used to be that the phrase “comic booky” was thrown around derisively, to cast the aspersion that a film emulated the gaudiest, most puerile impulses of the medium. Now, however, I’m comfortable saying that Captain Marvel is the best kind of “comic booky” movie, in the sense that it packs in an expansive mythology, replete with nods forward and backward to the MCU’s continuity (Djimon Hounsou and Lee Pace reprise – or is it preprise? – their roles as Korath and Ronan from Guardians of the Galaxy). It’s also delightfully comic booky in its use of the cinematic screen as a comics frame, with visual images overlapping and echoing in a way that reminds me of how well Zack Snyder mastered the technique in Watchmen; directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck manage to communicate almost exclusively visually, as in the myriad ways they use, for example, the color of blood to indicate chronology, revelation, and memory. 

Moreover, Captain Marvel is exceedingly comic booky for its willingness to reinvent what came before. I won’t spoil any of the film’s big twists, but suffice it to say that the movie’s Captain Marvel does not have the same secret origin as she does in the comics, largely because the comics are as tangled, refracted, and impenetrable as the stereotypes portend. In streamlining and refashioning, though, this Captain Marvel’s origin echoes all the versions from the comics and repurposes the story into something new and potent, something that works for this character and for the trajectory of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With its mid-90s setting, the film does fascinating work fitting into this long-running story, particularly with young agents Nick Fury and Phil Coulson.

But the film is rightfully Brie Larson’s, and she is far and away dynamite as the woman who would be Captain Marvel. Her performance is being compared to Gal Gadot’s in Wonder Woman or to Chadwick Boseman’s in Black Panther, but I think she’s much closer to Chris Evans in Captain America: The Winter Soldier – coming into herself with ease and a grin, effortlessly comfortable with herself and her friends even as her world is changing seismically around her. She’s funny, she’s confident, and she’s able to sell the trust and intimacy that comes with the kind of deep friendship she forms with Fury and others. It’s the kind of performance that can carry a franchise quite readily, and I for one am ready for Captain Marvel 2 (Kree Boogaloo?).

Special shout-out section: Samuel L. Jackson is a blast as a young Nick Fury. We get to see shades of the hardline Director Fury, but his youth and inexperience lets some of the Sam Jackson charm trickle in, and we never tire of seeing him cozy up with Goose the cat. Ben Mendelsohn is buckets of fun as Talos, who’s got more personality than a lot of unmemorable Marvel villains; Mendelsohn’s play with accents and his dexterous hand at manipulating his Skrull prosthetics make me hope that if/when the Skrulls do return, Mendelsohn will pop back into the MCU. Finally, much has been made of the fact that Pinar Toprak is the MCU’s first female composer, and she turns in a pretty exciting score. The music has often been a sticking point for Marvel, who are usually criticized for bland forgettable scores, but I’ve loved most of them and hope to hear more from Toprak in the future. Like Larson, she fits right in.

The Winter Soldier remains the gold standard for me, but Captain Marvel continues very nicely the easy-winning streak of debut films like Doctor Strange and Black Panther. It’s a movie with plenty of surprises, for newcomers and true believers alike, and it clicks into place with the delicate precision of the best comic book “retcons,” asking us to look back at the past and wonder if it really happened the way we think it did. At one point in the credits, we’re promised “Captain Marvel will return” – though where precisely, I shan’t spoil – as if we had any doubt that Marvel’s latest gamble would have a long-running payoff. Marvel has been on a real winning streak, and for a character whose namesake is, in a way, the very studio that’s introducing her, Captain Marvel is another success.

Captain Marvel is rated PG-13 for “sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and brief suggestive language.” Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. Written by Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Nicole Perlman, and Meg LeFauve. Based on the Marvel Comics by Stan Lee, Gene Colan, Roy Thomas, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and David López. Starring Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Lashana Lynch, Annette Bening, Clark Gregg, and Jude Law.