Review: "The Marvels" isn't a disaster, but it's barely a movie
Marvel officially enters its "please clap" era
2023 will likely be remembered – as regards the history of superhero movies anyway – as the year the world moved on from Marvel and their tired bag of tricks, the one project that came out in good shape – Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, which works so well because it is a James Gunn movie first and a Marvel movie second – only serving to emphasize the limpness of everything else. This weekend’s latest release – The Marvels, a sequel to 2019’s mega-blockbuster Captain Marvel, but also the Disney+ shows Ms. Marvel and WandaVision and Secret Invasion and [Redacted for spoiler reasons] – isn’t quite the creative nadir of Marvel’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year, but it might be the most exemplary in demonstrating how little gas is left in this tank.
To be clear, The Marvels is not the ‘worst’ film to hail from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Thor: Love & Thunder and Spider-Man: No Way Home are both far uglier and more aesthetically bankrupt; Eternals is longer and dumber and infinitely more tone-deaf; Wakanda Forever has more wasted potential and frustrated ambition. There’s little The Marvels does poorly that other post-Endgame projects, for theaters or for Disney+, haven’t done even worse. Where this one feels unfortunately exceptional is in the pervasive sense of creative defeatism on display. Its script is less a first draft than a collection of notes and ideas on its way to becoming an outline; its edit is loose and unformed and full of awkward gaps and even more awkward pauses, an assemblage of scenes that never coalesces into something with a pulse; its tone leaps between glibly chuckling at the film’s weightlessness and trying to shoehorn in earnest character beats at predetermined intervals; its cinematography, apparently handled by Steve McQueen’s virtuoso director of photography Sean Bobbitt, is so entirely your standard Marvel fare – everybody boxed into their own medium close-up against a green screen without master shots or group shots, isolating everyone into their own little corner except in the pre-vized action scenes handled by another team – that I would believe it was shot by an algorithm.
The Marvels is, in short, barely a movie. In an interesting inversion from the run of Disney+ shows that feel like 2-hour features stretched out to 6-episode miniseries, The Marvels is the most aggressively televisual thing to ever come from Kevin Feige’s comic book empire, a thoroughly episodic endeavor complete with an A-story (the titular superheroic women doing superheroic things) and a B-story (Samuel L. Jackson getting a paycheck as Nick Fury delivers technobabble surrounded by glorified extras), that feels like it was stitched together from several half-finished episodes of an abandoned TV series. The best of the actual TV shows Marvel has produced in recent years – like Loki and Moon Knight – look a lot more ‘cinematic’ than anything projected theatrically here, where the few moments that are adequately lit and reasonably colorful stick out because the rest of the film is anonymous digitally shot sludge that’s barely been color-graded. The entire film – which apparently cost $220 million to produce after tax breaks – looks and feels cheap, sometimes in a charming way with a sort of Power Rangers Saturday morning adventure effect, but mostly in a way where one wonders who at Marvel is embezzling money for whom, because it certainly isn’t ending up on screen.
It's a shame, because I like these characters, and I like this premise. Captain Marvel was mostly a dud, but it had sparks of life, largely thanks to Brie Larson; I came out of it wanting to see more of Carol Danvers, just as every bit of Kamala Khan material in recent years – even in compromised projects like Crystal Dynamics’ doomed Avengers game or the messy but endearing Ms. Marvel TV series – has left me wanting more of that character. Iman Vellani is a real discovery, and she deserves a real showcase. Monica Rambeau has never been quite as interesting as the actress portraying her, Teyonah Parris, but if you have talent like that on the payroll, greatness is always within reach. The Marvels puts them all together in an adventure where their similar powers become entangled, leading to each character changing places with the other when leaping into action. It should be fun. Mostly it isn’t.
I desperately wish the film has picked a perspective amongst these characters and stuck with it. The Marvels immediately strikes a weird structural imbalance at the outset trying to juxtapose a whimsical intro to Kamala Khan’s in-universe Captain Marvel fangirling and the actual Captain Marvel envisioning a recap of her first film, and the whole first-act is distractingly off-kilter as we pop between characters without ever establishing a firm point-of-view. I can easily imagine a version of this film told strictly from Kamala’s eyes that would work wonders, that started out with a few minutes establishing her normal day-to-day life before she’s sucked into this larger cosmic adventure and becomes an audience surrogate for the wondrous sights on display. Instead, she’s mostly used as a comic relief cutaway whenever Feige’s spreadsheet has determined there needs to be more glib self-referentiality, and the film tries to be every character’s movie all at once. It winds up being nobody’s, and the resulting adventure is beset with tonal whiplash. The glibness clashes with the awe Kamala feels for these superpowered women around her, which clashes with the strained relationship between Monica and Carol built on feelings of abandonment and resentment. One early set piece depicts the destruction of the Skrull home-world and the partial genocide of their race; the next alien planet the heroes visit is a musical world where everyone sings and dances. There is no one in the driver’s seat, so the film lurches between attempts at sincerity and attempts at absurdist comedy and winds up leaving no impression other than mild bewilderment.
Here is where I realize I’ve written almost 1,000 words without mentioning the film’s credited director and co-writer, Nia DaCosta. It’s not an accident; DaCosta started distancing herself from the film months ago and apparently didn’t stick around for post-production, but even without the gossip in the trades, there’s simply no hint of a directorial signature anywhere here, nor any sense of an overriding vision or artistic intent. The film feels unfinished, its theatrical edit playing more like an early workprint where some scenes have yet to be tightened and honed – an excruciatingly long exposition dump aboard Carol’s ship is filled with intended jokes that barely register as humor because the edit is so lacking in snap or precision – and many scenes feel like they’re missing entirely. The first act jumps from location to location without establishing setting or stakes, master shots and transitional material are largely absent, and there are leaps in geography and storytelling that would be confusing if there was anything interesting enough to be worth investing in – and that’s all before I mention that both the villain’s central motivation and Carol’s inner-conflict stem from an incident that happened off-screen between movies in a Captain Marvel sequel that never got made. Much has been made of The Marvels being the short film in the MCU, but of course there is nothing inherently wrong or even notable about a film running 105 minutes. It only matters because it feels like the film wound up at that length after being abandoned with a shrug; I can imagine both shorter and longer cuts that would work significantly better. What we have feels like a work in progress.
But that’s Marvel these days, isn’t it? The most surprising thing isn’t that superhero fatigue has finally set in – that was inevitable, because all genres have a shelf life – but that it feels like Marvel itself is more tired of this whole endeavor than any of their viewers. The Marvels is the cinematic equivalent of Jeb Bush’s infamous “please clap” gaffe, a sad affair too defeated to even beg for applause with enthusiasm. Its final scene and the mid-credits stinger are the two flop-sweatiest moments the MCU has yet produced, another set of teases we know won’t go anywhere, but that limply attempt to produce the “I recognize this thing!” dopamine rush that was once the fuel powering the Marvel engine. The problem is that the engine has seized; pour as much oil on it as you want, but those parts just aren’t moving anymore.
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