‘The Marvels’ Is Marvel Hanging Its Female Superheroes Out to Dry

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the Marvel Cinematic Universe — or, and we’re just coining this term right this very second, the “MCU” — has had a shaky time trying to find a post-Infinity Saga groove. But one of the major highlights of the past few years has been the Ms. Marvel TV series, in which Pakistani-American teen Kamala Khan discovers an intergalactic bracelet belonging to her grandmother, and boom! It unlocks powers within her and turns this New Jersey-based Avengers superfan into a bona fide superhero. It offered a rare, nuanced depiction of Muslim family life, gave us a fresh comedic star in Canadian actor Iman Vellani, and felt like a breath of fresh air in an increasingly humid, interminably interconnected I.P. And, as you may recall, the first season ended with a post-credits sequence that featured Khan inexplicably switching places with her hero Carol Danvers, a.k.a. Captain Marvel.

So we suggest that you think of The Marvels less as an actual MCU movie and more like an extended bonus episode of the Ms. Marvel series; you’re likely to have a much more satisfying experience filtering it through the lens of Khan and Co. getting into a cosmic misadventure than you are, say, the 33rd chapter of a cinematic universe inching nearer toward its own Big Crunch. Bringing together Brie Larson’s interstellar guardian, Teyonah Parris’ former Air Force officer/current S.W.O.R.D. employee Monica Rambeau (one of several Captain Marvels in the comics), and Vellani’s scrappy young show-stealing newbie, this wobbly addition to the overall saga does not pass muster as either a sequel to the 2019 Captain Marvel solo outing or a sum-of-its-parts team-up. As a big-screen showcase for Vellani to do what she does best, and that just happens to have a few guest appearances from fellow MCU dwellers? Let’s just say that it allows Thor: The Dark World to comfortably keep its worst-in-show franchise place, at the very least.

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Kicking off with the TV show’s last-second switcheroo, The Marvels immediately starts playing musical chairs with its trio, flipping them between scenarios involving deep space, the orbiting headquarters of Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, cashing that sweet, sweet check), and Khan’s New Jersey home. The reason for all the uncontrollable teleporting back and forth? A Kree warrior named Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) has unearthed a bracelet from a moon rock that imbues her with a massive amount of power. She plans to use her newfound gift to siphon resources to her home world of Hala, which has been decimated thanks to someone referred to as “the Annihilator.” It’s also, we should mention, part of a set, with Ms. Marvel’s mystical bangle being the world-destroying jewelry’s twin. And this talisman has ripped a hole in the fabric of space and time, hence the various Marvels, captains and otherwise, being teleported willy-nilly.

Eventually, the three of them will find themselves in the same place at the same time, team up and fight together in sequences virtually indistinguishable from every other Marvel movie battle sequence not involving Wakanda or a gauntlet-enabled snap. Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie shows up (not a spoiler, it’s in the trailer) and then leaves — don’t blink, you’ll miss it. A training montage set to the Beastie Boys’ “Intergalactic” isn’t as cute or as clever as it thinks it is, but at least the three actors seem to genuinely be having fun … which is more than one can say for the rest of Larson’s performance, which falls somewhere between weary and “contractual obligation.” We do not blame her, frankly. Danvers and Rambeau have a long and storied history, of course, which the film keeps touching on briefly before whipping itself into either a goofy set piece — a musical number apparently borrowed from Disney’s live-action Aladdin!; a WTF rescue involving a literal herding of cats and a song from the hit Broadway show Cats! — some somber depictions of near-genocide, or in a few cases, an uneasy mix of both.

(A quick sidebar: For those of you who’ve been keeping abreast of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s various conflicts and oh-so-secret invasions, you’ll remember that the Kree and the green-skinned shape-shifters known as the Skrulls have been engaged in a long, protracted war that goes back eons, and that the Skrulls have essentially become planet-hopping refugees. The war naturally plays a big part in both the Kree villain’s plan and the Danvers’ long-standing promise to protect the Skrulls. Keen readers of the comics and longtime viewers of the MCU’s movies and TV shows may have found themselves drawing certain parallels to IRL events over the years. Draw your own conclusions. But we can confirm that subplots involving radicalized militants, displaced people, and aggressive counterattacks that blur moral and ethical lines play extremely different at this particular moment in time, and fail to work as either escapism or allegory.)

Whenever The Marvels focuses on Khan’s Grade-A fangirling over her new partners, or her family back in New Jersey (big up Saagar Shaikh, Zenobia Shroff, and Mohan Kapur for reprising their roles as the Khan clan), or the character adding a sense of gosh-all wonder to the proceedings — Vellani’s own giddiness even occasionally becomes infectious with her costars — you can feel the distant sound of a pulse beneath the din. Outside of that, this is just three times as much business as usual with one third the amount of production-company commitment. Seriously, this should have been either a “special episode” played out over 45 minutes or a six-hour miniseries, in which the relationships among this trinity could have been better fleshed out and the jarring tonal shifts relegated to separate chapters.

As for director Nia DaCosta, she has already proven herself with a decent indie thriller (2018’s Little Woods) and an underrated, regrettably slept-on horror remake/requel (2021’s Candyman). And there are a few standout moments here, from a quick pre-battle banterfest among Vellani, Larson, and Parris to one jaw-dropping shot of Danvers rushing to save a friend against a giant, black cosmos, that suggest an actual sensibility peeking through. How much of that was washed away as things progressed, or how much of the widely circulated rumors about reshoots, etc., are just industry white noise, is anyone’s guess. It’s still a project that feels like it’s suffered a death-by-a-thousand-executive-committee-led-cuts.

Others will simply pile on The Marvels for different reasons, of course: who’s directing it, who’s starring in it, the portrait of sisterhood it projects in between the sturm und drang. Never mind the Kree-Skrull war, here comes the culture wars! Haters are gonna hate — nothing to do about that, except to call out these toxic-bro fans as assholes and move on. Ditto the requisite need to shoehorn in coming-attractions previews via post-credits sequences, presented here as a particularly obnoxious hint at a particularly inevitable crossover, because multiverses gonna multiverse. (For a hint, rewatch the Easter eggs from Ms. Marvel‘s last episode. Or don’t.) But you can recognize that the powers that be have treated this less as a piece of the bigger MCU puzzle and more as a IDGAF time-killer in between dealing with bigger problems. “Being the best you can be” had become a catchphrase for the comics’ version of Carol Danvers. Here, it feels like the entire vibe has devolved to, “Being done with this already, thanks very much.”

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