BEFORE: Here we go, finally back to the MCU, I haven't watched a Marvel movie since last August, when I watched "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3". This one was released in November of last year, but I was too busy then wrapping up the year and stressing out over my job situation. (Didn't even really celebrate much at Christmas.). But that was then and this is now, it's good just to watch some superhero stuff again. I tried to watch some Marvel miniseries over the break, but I only was able to get to "What If?" Vol. 1. If I'd had more time, I would have watched the "Ms. Marvel" series, which would have been a great lead-in to this movie, I'm sure. I can still get to that, also "Echo", but I need more time.
The important thing is that I got here, and I've managed to cut my response time down, in some cases, to months rather than years. Some real success stories this year, like getting to "Maestro" before the Oscars, and "Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget" before it got too old, "Tar", "Babylon" and "The Whale" in just over a year, and last week I watched "Saltburn", "Heart of Stone" and "Gran Turismo" just about two months (or so) after they started streaming. Two months is really good for me, and "The Marvels" made it to Disney+ on February 7, so really, that was just about six weeks ago. That's about as fast as I could get to it, considering that February is all about romance films and not superhero ones. Now I have to watch a DC Comics movie this week to balance things out, right?
Zawe Ashton carries over from "Mr. Malcolm's List".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Captain Marvel" (Movie #3,175)
THE PLOT: Carol Danvers gets her powers entangled with those of Kamala Khan and Monica Rambeau, forcing them to work together to save the universe.
AFTER: Man, this one gets off to a rough start. Part of the problem maybe was the fact that I haven't watched the "Ms. Marvel" show - but I read enough Marvel Comics to know who Kamala Khan is, she's worked her way up through the ranks in the comic books, became a very popular character when Marvel was trying (for, like, the 2,800th time) to get more girls to read comics and maybe also teens of Arabic descent, and before she even had the TV show she was hanging out with Spider-Man (in a riff on an old comic called "Marvel Team-Up", they made a 3-issue limited series called "Ms. Marvel Team-Up") and then she became so popular that they had to kill off her character. I know, I know, that seems counter-productive but the geniuses at Marvel kill off only their most popular characters, just to give them a new #1 issue when the next writer figures out a way to make them alive again. Somehow that sells more comic books, I remember they killed off Phoenix when I was a kid and that was a BIG deal, but what do Phoenixes do besides rise up from the ashes? Since then I've seen every member of the Fantastic Four die twice, Iron Man several times, and Captain America even - but they always come back. About five years ago they killed off Wolverine and I think he stayed dead for about a year, our time, but remember he's got a healing power so he'll always come back, it just takes time. Spider-Man's died a couple times, too, and I'm not even counting anybody who got "blipped" during the Infinity Gauntlet series, because just like in "Avengers: Endgame", they all came back.
So it's a sign of how popular Ms. Marvel became that she had to die, and then brought back about a month later, resurrected by the X-Men and revealed to be part Inhuman, part mutant. What did that accomplish? It made the news and it sold comic books, isn't that enough? Also, maybe it pissed off a few of her fans who didn't get the memo that they needed to start reading X-Men books if they wanted to see their favorite character again. Who can keep track of all this stuff? But it seems that death in the Marvel Cinematic Universe may be a bit more permanent, because so far they haven't called Iron Man or Black Widow back into service. I"m told now that this is somehow the Hulk's fault, because he was the one who thought back all the people that Thanos killed with the snap of his fingers, and he forgot to think about Black Widow as one of them. Yes, the fate of some fictional people hinges on very specific technicalities.
But let's look on the positive side of things, OK? For every actor or actress who's tired of playing their Marvel hero characters and wants out of their contract, there are plenty more willing to take their place, and Marvel has thousands of characters who haven't been in movies yet. Are they planning a "Thunderbolts" style team (U.S. Agent, White Widow, Winter Soldier, Ghost, Taskmaster and Red Guardian) or a "Young Avengers" team (Kate Bishop, Ms. Marvel, Ironheart, America Chavez, Ant-Man's daughter and Scarlet Witch's missing kids). Maybe both, but it's clear that the "Black Widow" movie and the "WandaVision" TV show could turn out to be the most important recent MCU titles.
Anyway, one reason I didn't rush out and see "The Marvels" in the movie theater was because Marvel fans seemed to have mixed reviews, a very lukewarm reception for this movie. Some people said, "Well, I don't know about this new direction the movies are going in...." and I can't tell you how many times I've heard people at the comic book store saying that about the comic books. A new writer takes over "Spider-Man" or "The Hulk" and people are bound to say exactly that, "I don't know about this new direction..." so congratulations, if you've said that about either the comics or the movies, then you're a Marvel veteran. Next you just have to learn to say, "Well, it's not like the comics/movies they made when I was a kid..." and you're well on your way to becoming a disgruntled former/current fan. (See also: "Star Wars: Episodes 7 to 9")
The big problem here is forcing three characters to team up who are not familiar with working together, and two of them have never been part of a superhero team before. But since their powers are similar and they've all touched this alien bracelet device thingie, two out of the three teleport and switch places when they use their powers at the same time. It takes WAY too long for these three heroes to figure out what's going on, and if they're confused, then I'm confused. This was a terrible idea, all this jumping around, it prevents them AND us from getting a handle on the story because all we're concerned about is trying to figure out what happened to the hero that was JUST THERE, now she's gone again, and another superhero took her place, and one who can't fly is now falling toward the earth. Very inconvenient, very unsettling and very panic-inducing, the first half-hour of this movie will STRESS YOU OUT, and come on, we all go to the movies to relax, right? This isn't helping.
The only way for these characters to figure out what's going on is to talk to each other, only they can't do that because this weird powers entanglement keeps teleporting one of them away. Super annoying. To stop this, they need to STOP using their powers, and then, really, what good are they? Will they then just throw things at the aliens? That's not going to work. Finally one of them has to fly or travel in a space-ship to find the other two, and then they can talk about what's happening, and once they're in the same room, who cares if they teleport because they're all still going to be in the same room after. But please, let's get coordinated, OK? We need our heroes to focus and work together to defeat the evil power.
The evil power here is Den-Barr, the new leader of the Kree - which I know were revealed as a villainous race in the "Captain Marvel" movie, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around it, because it's not like the comics they made when I was a kid (Oh, God, here I go) where there were two alien races, the Kree and the Skrulls, who were always at war with each other, and the Skrulls were evil, shape-shifting monster aliens who couldn't be trusted and the Kree were the humanoid (but often blue-skinned) race controlled by the Supreme Intelligence, so they at least sounded really smart, and if the heroes had to pick a dog to back in that fight, at that time it would have been the Kree. But then came the "Secret Invasion" Marvel show, which had Skrulls invading Earth just like in the comics, but in the recent show they were only doing this to survive, as the Kree destroyed their homeworld. So wait, now the Kree are the BAD GUYS? Well, that's maybe an oversimplification, but yes. Here the Kree have almost totally wiped out the Skrulls, except for a few refugees on a couple planets here and there.
It really helped me to see the Skrulls acting all nasty and devious again in "Secret Invasion", but that kind of seems in conflict with their depiction in "The Marvels", where there are just a few left and they're dying out and they don't seem like they even want to be bothered changing shape, not even to save themselves. Umm, hello, your world is being destroyed, do you think maybe you might want to fight to save it? No? Just going to let a couple of women from Earth do everything for you? Sorry you couldn't be bothered, maybe your race just isn't worth saving? Then of course you also had to watch the TV show "WandaVision" in addition to "Ms. Marvel" to learn who the other two heroes are, and how they got their powers. OK, so now if you're complaining about how watching ONE movie means you now have to watch THREE other movies and TWO TV series to really understand the whole story, congratulations, that's another sign that you are now a Marvel veteran fan. Because in the comic books there are similar cross-overs - if I buy the X-Men Annual, the Amazing Spider-Man Annual, the Avengers Annual and the Iron Man Annual, which are titles I read monthly, then the story will also continue in the Spider-Gwen Annual, which is not a title that I regularly buy, only they're trying to trick me to buy something I don't want just to see the end of the story I've been reading.
But really, things have been a bit downhill ever since "Endgame", and by that I mean that the last Marvel movie I watched, "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" was a bit of a waste, too hung up on Rocket's sad origin story as a lab test animal, not what I came from at all - plus, who was Adam Warlock, what were his powers and what was he all about? See, you've already forgotten him, haven't you, because he was so poorly developed. This means that the best "Guardians" movie in the last few years was actually "Thor: Love & Thunder" or maybe it was the GotG Christmas Special, your call. It's all mixed up and things are topsy-turvy, and it almost feels like there are a dozen writers and directors each doing their own thing, and none of them are talking to each other. Who's in charge here? And yeah, I can say the same thing about the comic books, which all have different writers and editors, and except for the crossover events, they're NOT talking to each other, and one comic will kill off Black Widow and then another writer will bring her back to life in a different comic about three weeks later. The books used to CARE about continuity, and now that there's a multiverse, reality doesn't mean anything any more, it can be changed as needed.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has survived all this time without the X-Men and the Fantastic Four, because the rights to those characters were licensed to other film companies, which eventually all got bought up by Disney, as everything will be someday. So now they're going to combine the universes somehow like DC did in "The Flash", and how do you just jam two universes together and then continue on like nothing just happened? I guess we're all going to find out...
Oh, yeah, the three Marvel heroines figure out the teleportation thing, yada yada yada, they learn to function together as a team in order to get the bangles away from the bad person and defeat the evil power. But you knew that, right? But the battle creates a hole in time-space that only Monica Rambeau can energy-stitch back together, but for some reason she can only do it from the other side. NITPICK POINT: Her name is Photon, was that so hard to work into the damn movie? Sure, she also went by Captain Marvel for a while, like who didn't? Carol Danvers was calling herself Binary at the time, so the name was available. Then she was "Warbird", but that's another story. But Monica Rambeau is now Photon, which is a great name. Well, it's good. Maybe it's just OK. Maybe this whole movie is just that, OK. But not great. Wait, I think maybe she's called Spectrum now in the comics - another just-OK code name.
NITPICK POINT: I've got issues with the teleportation switching in the early part of the film. Later in the movie, when the three Marvels are training, they learn to switch places while walking, juggling, jumping rope, and in these instances, they jump into the other person's place and still are doing the act they were doing before the jump, in other words, they teleport and maintain the same direction and inertia that they had before the switch. But this means that if someone teleports while they are flying, or say, falling towards the ground, they would still have this flying motion or falling motion to complete after they teleport. Nightcrawler has this problem when he teleports, if he's falling at terminal velocity, he might need to jump several times to dispel the momentum that he picked up during a long fall from a great height. But here someone who CAN'T fly is falling toward the ground, which means they would be in motion at a great speed, and if they teleport JUST before hitting the ground, they wouldn't die from the impact, but they would carry that motion direction and inertia with them to the new location when they teleport, so wherever they end up, they're still likely to crash into something with great force, or else they will continue falling at the new location, if space permits. But teleporting will not STOP them from crashing, as they've still got potential energy from inertia resulting from gravity. The new person teleporting into their location, two feet above the ground, might be OK, because now they have very little potential energy - but that person who was falling will continue falling somewhere else, or will suffer an impact, regardless.
Also starring Brie Larson (last seen in "Unicorn Store"), Samuel L. Jackson (ditto), Teyonah Paris (last seen in "Candyman" (2021)), Iman Vellani, Gary Lewis (last seen in "Filth"), Park Seo-Joon (last seen in "Parasite"), Zenobia Shroff (last heard in "Soul"), Mohan Kapur (last seen in "Spider-Man: No Way Home"), Saagar Shaikh, Leila Farzad, Abraham Popoola (last seen in "Morbius"), Lashana Lynch (last seen in "No Time to Die"), Tessa Thompson (last seen in "Creed III"), Daniel Ings (last seen in "Eddie the Eagle"), Kenedy McCallam-Martin, with cameos from Hailee Steinfeld (last seen in "Begin Again"), and the voice of (REDACTED) (last seen in "I Don't Know How She Does It")
RATING: 6 out of 10 escape pods
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