So clearly I came up with the title for the review before I saw the movie. The title of the review only includes such positive verbage because of the title of the movie. I’m sure I’m not the only person who used such fun wordplay in their review title. But maybe I am, because I know reviews for this aren’t positive. Is mine? You’ll see, won’t you. Anyway, traditional review formatting. Non-spoilers, then spoilers. This review might be a little longer because I have some specific things to say about Marvel and the discourse surrounding their recent output and future as a cinematic universe. I know I’m biased, but comic book movies and superhero stories still come out all the time that are good and have the ability to continue to be good. This is a genre of storytelling in and of itself, it was before invading the world of movies and TV shows and it had its own tropes and cliches based on the monthly serialized nature of paneled comic book storytelling.
Inevitably, when transitioning stories and characters to a different genre, the expectations of narrative progression and storytelling in that new genre still apply. So taking characters and stories that have evolved and continued for eighty years and have never really grown or changed and keep going through different variations of the same adventures and stories, and inserting those into a universe of movies and television where the world-building and overall narrative is structured differently, is risky. It can work and has worked. Marvel has been good and can be good project to project depending. It all depends on the quality of each project and each of them having a unique look and story and interesting character narrative. And recently they just haven’t been hitting it out of the park universally and they’ve been making too much to begin with. Anyway, I’m rambling. I’ll get into it. I have to do the review first.

The Marvels stars Brie Larson, Iman Vellani, Teyonah Paris, Samuel L. Jackson, and Zawe Ashton. It also features Park Seo-joon, Zenobia Shroff, Mohan Kapur, Saagar Shaikh, Leila Farzad, and Abraham Popoola. It was directed by Nia DaCosta, and written by Nia DaCosta, Megan McDonnell (WandaVision) and Elissa Karasik (Loki).

Quick Plot Rundown –
Okay, have you seen the six episode TV series Ms Marvel, the nine episode TV series WandaVision, the six episode TV series Secret Invasion and the movies Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame? You haven’t? You’ve only seen the movies and part of WandaVision? Well, that makes sense. But good news, Nick Fury doesn’t seem to remember that Secret Invasion was just farted out onto screens globally, so you can forget about that too.
Anyway, Kamala Khan is Ms Marvel, the world’s biggest fan of Captain Marvel (Even though her public heroic exploits include flying through a ship and fighting Thanos for a minute and Kamala heard all of this through Scott Lang’s podcast which Marvel needs to release for real) and she accidentally activated her inherent mutant abilities by putting on her grandmother’s (Great-grandmother?) bangle. Rifts to other realms were opened, Kamala briefly time traveled to colonized India, and now she’s a superhero.
Dar-Venn, the new leader of the Kree empire and new accuser, finds the second bangle at the beginning of this movie and uses it to merge Kamala’s powers with Captain Marvel and Monica Rambeau’s, so the three of them switch places whenever they use their powers at the same time. She replaced Ronan, who Chris Pratt danced to death back in 2014. She’s a pretty generic villain but a good actress and her homeworld, Hala, is dying due to Captain Marvel’s past actions. So Dar-Venn decides to hack into the universal hexagonal jump points that spaceships use to move from one side of the galaxy to another, and she breaks them so she can suck the natural resources from other planets and return them to her own. So she takes oxygen from the Skrulls, water from this planet of people whose language is song, and the sun from us on Earth. And the three of them have to stop her and overcome their sudden switching problem, their reluctance to work as a team, Carol’s act-first attitude that got them in this position, and Monica’s issues with Carol leaving her when she needed her. Also Nick Fury is there, but mostly just to do funny banter with Kamala’s family.

General Non-Spoilery Thoughts –
I liked it. I thought it was pretty fun. A lot of people out there are calling this “The worst Marvel movie yet” which I know gets said every time a new one drops, but come on. This one? No. It isn’t. Not even slightly. And maybe I’m wrong, because apparently the other “Worst Marvel things yet” are Eternals, Thor: The Dark World, Thor: Love and Thunder, Black Widow and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and I think all of those are perfectly fine to good. Except for She-Hulk which I think is really good and people should shut up. The CGI is a bit wonky in parts here, there’s some weird green screen stuff, the villain isn’t super developed, and they clearly cut the payoff to a weird joke that deserved more time to develop and didn’t spend enough time on the emotional moments between Carol or Monica, let alone handle them that well. It’s not a perfect movie. But it’s fun. These characters are fun and they’re good together. I know that part of the reason this will underperform is because not everybody has Disney + and not everybody watched all those shows or wants to. But I did. And I’ve read a lot of comics with these characters in them. I liked WandaVision and Ms Marvel. I didn’t love Captain Marvel because I think it’s kind of boring and there’s not much to it and they do nothing with Ben Mendelsohn really. I’ll talk more about him later.
But yes, I unapologetically enjoyed 75% of this movie. Even the setup for upcoming movies that people will roll their eyes at. I like the Marvel universe and it has the capacity to do well when it focuses on the characters and does interesting action sequences with those characters. That’s what I say. And this one had fun character interactions and some fun action because they all kept swapping and that made things more interesting. I would watch this if you’re on the fence. It’s not the best movie ever, or the best Marvel movie, but pairing these three characters together works really well and I think is way more interesting than just having another Captain Marvel solo movie. Anyway, let’s get into it.

Characters –
Carol Danvers AKA Captain Marvel – Brie Larson
My main issue with her first movie was that it was kind of boring and they didn’t do much with her. She’s just a very straight down the middle character. I liked her friendship with Maria Rambeau and Fury. But I just thought she was kind of hollow in that first one. I put that down more to the screenplay being fairly bare bones than her though. In this one, I think they build on what was shown in that movie and Endgame a tiny bit. She was still much the same, but with more fun jokey interactions with Kamala. I do think there could have been more to her character arc if they leant into what they had a bit more. The reason Dar-Benn is stealing resources from other planets is that Carol destroyed the AI controlling her world and now it’s dying. And Carol did that out of rage in the hopes that she’d be freeing a society that brainwashed and controlled her.
This is a pattern with her, of acting without thinking of the implications, which is dangerous when she’s so powerful. You’d think this would be called out and highlighted and made part of her arc in the movie. She got her powers because she beat Maria to the airfield to go on the mission that backfired. She destroyed the Kree empire and fought Thanos twice without really thinking it through, and in this, there is a specific scene in which Ms Marvel is using her energy powers to make constructs that Skrulls could slide down and then run to the ship, but instead of letting her save people, Carol uses her powers and the two of them switch, causing the Skrulls to fall. And she only saved two of those people. That was a situation in which she didn’t have to be the one taking point, and I thought for sure that would be a big part of the character conflict, but it wasn’t.
Also Monica is mad at her because she never came home when she said she would but that just gets brushed away when Carol reveals that she never went home because she felt horrible for destroying Kree civilization and being labeled “The Annihilator” and spent thirty years trying to save as many space civilizations in need as possible. That’s interesting, and Brie Larson is a great actress and plays it well, but it’s maybe a minute long exposition scene that happens in a vague field of wheat. It really feels like the emotional stuff between these two got cut out a bunch.
Oh, the one thing I really did like is that Carol still has that memory device the Skrulls used on her to find the tesseract and she’s been using it all this time to still work on reclaiming or repairing the memories the Kree took from her. Which means it’s been like thirty years and she’s still not fully herself, and that’s both sad and interesting. I like this movie because there’s interesting things going on. And we get to see her say goodbye in flashback to Maria Rambeau, which was nice.

Kamala Khan AKA Ms Marvel – Iman Vellani
I really like Iman Vellani. I think she was a great choice to play this character because in real life she loves these characters and comics as much as her character does. If you go on Letterbox I think you can still find her two star review of Captain Marvel when it came out saying “These stars are not for Brie Larson, I will sacrifice my life… for Brie Larson.” So she also knows a generic movie when she sees one. And she’s writing a Ms Marvel comic book right now, which is really cool. I’ve heard she also keeps hounding Kevin Feige about whenever a Marvel movie comes out that claims the main MCU Marvel universe is #616, because everybody knows that’s the comic book universe and they take place in the same multiverse and the MCU is #199999. Good for you, Iman. Keep yelling at him, as I would too. Stop saying it’s 616, Kevin you fucking idiot. Anyway, I liked Ms Marvel because she’s great and her family is great and they did those fun cartoons where her sketches were coming to life, and all of that is in this. It was really fun. Good for her. I mean, I also hate Iman Vellani because she’s the same age as me and I hate people that are my age or younger and more successful than me. If you’re going to be talented and have an awesome life, either do it quietly or wait until you’re 25 or older, that’s what I say. This includes half the cast of Stranger Things, Billie Eilish, and you if you’re reading this and you’re 20 or younger and very famous.

Monica Rambeau – Teyonah Paris
I really like Teyonah Paris as Monica Rambeau. I think she’s funny and badass and cool in a very particular way. She’s an incredible actress, and they revisit the scene of her coming back from the snap to an empty hospital room without her mother, which was heart-wrenching back in 2021. She continued to be great in this movie, and I liked that she was the one who is the most inexperienced with her powers, but also the effects for her powers were consistently the worst. I also like that their way of explaining how she got her powers was saying she “Walked through a witch’s hex”. That’s really funny. I think this movie would have benefitted from more supporting characters from Ms Marvel and WandaVision. Kamala’s family was funny and great, but I would’ve liked to see Bruno and Jimmy Woo. Anyway, good stuff. I have more to say, but that’ll be in spoilers.

Nick Fury – Samuel L Jackson
Okay, so I love Samuel L Jackson, but I’m starting to hate the MCU Nick Fury. He sucks. He’s an incapable idiot at this point. Not because of this, he was good in this, but he was mostly just there to do quips and give exposition for a very specific gag that happens in the third act. Originally, MCU Nick Fury was just like comic book Nick Fury. He was a mysterious badass that showed up every once in a while to do or say something cool. Even in Winter Soldier when he found out that an evil Nazi organization was operating right under his nose, he was still able to pull off an excellent car chase, laser through concrete, and successfully come up with an on the go plan to fake his death and stay five steps ahead of his enemy. He said cool stuff like “The last time I trusted someone, I lost an eye.” Then in Captain Marvel, we see young Nick Fury working a middle management job at S.H.I.E.L.D. and doesn’t notice when his boss is clearly replaced by a Skrull. Then it’s revealed that that person Fury trusted who scratched out his eye was actually Goose, the alien cat that can swallow people with tentacles. And according to Secret Invasion, he then recruited the Skrulls to do spy work for him while he pretended to find them a home. So for years and years he built up his mythos as the world’s best and most untouchable intelligence agent, and he was just an idiot with a team of indestructible green shape-changing killing machines. Because when the chips were down and he had to go back to Earth for that very boring TV show, he wandered around lamenting about how the world had changed while he was gone, clearly not knowing what he was doing. I don’t think Marvel is all bad or on a general decline, but that show was hot garbage. There’s a group of Skrulls in this that have nothing to do with the evil Skrulls we just saw, and it’s insane to me that they never planned to connect these things at all. You don’t think you should’ve kept Ben Mendelsohn alive and had him take the Skrulls off-planet so they could be the ones saved by the Marvels in this movie, so when the Skrull leader tells Carol he’s disappointed in her and she ruined a peace treaty (That was clearly a ruse from the beginning, the Kree didn’t want peace.) the audience can actually get the sense that the deaths of these characters matter and Carol cares what this man thinks? I mean, come on. I’m so pissed that they killed Mendo in Secret Invasion. What a waste of a great actor. I realize this has little to do with Samuel L Jackson’s actual performance in this movie, and it’s more just me ranting about how bad that show is. That is the worst thing the MCU has ever done, easily. And the worst movie is Iron Man 3.

Dar-Benn – Zawe Ashton
I have very little to say about the villain because the movie has very little to say about the villain. As I said, she’s somewhat generic and a lot like all the villains we’ve seen before. She also fits in team “Actually in the right but they kill people” with other past villains like Killmonger, the Flag Smashers, Namor, and Gravik. Those guys were all leaders of refugee groups or their own races that are basically meant to be refugee groups, and it’s really weird that they keep having these characters be the villains? With Namor it makes more sense because they’re just warring nations and Killmonger is a political dissident, but the other three groups are all being wronged actively but have chosen extreme responses. I think maybe it’s just best to not imply that fictional refugee communities have to be villains. These are people that were displaced and made homeless by the sudden return of half the global population, promised a new home and then used to commit atrocities in the shadows for decades, or have watched their planet slowly die due to lack of resources. Why do they keep being framed as the villain? That’s really weird. Also, if they didn’t have these characters run around and brutally kill just because they want to get what’s theirs at any cost, it would be way less of a narrative copout and cause the audience and the characters to actually question who is in the right. Of course that would be awful. Audiences don’t want to question if heroes are always good or not, do they? But what if this movie was reframed so we see Dar-Benn live her life in this cold, analytical society, but with people and a world she loves, and then watch Captain Marvel destroy the Supreme Intelligence and plunge Hala into disarray. And then what if Dar-Benn focused all her rage on destroying her and didn’t kill a single other person or fight the other two Marvels? What if she merged the powers on accident and that gets in the way and makes it harder for her to kill Carol? Because she can absorb her powers, which isn’t developed much. I don’t know. The actress brought a natural chaotic rage and desperation to the role and made it a bit more than nothing, in my opinion at least. I felt the same way I did about Namor; I like them both because they are just psychotic leaders that only want to help their people. So yes, while we’ve seen this before and the villain is just some random obscure Kree from the comics, like last time (Ugh. THERE ARE SO MANY VILLAINS TO PICK FROM!!!) and she’s not in it much, I think the three main characters more than made up for that, and she was a perfectly adequate villain with a strong enough motivation and plan that’s slightly different from all the other variations we’ve seen before that I enjoyed.

Score/Soundtrack –
I thought there would be more soundtrack drops than just the one use of “Intergalactic” by The Beastie Boys, which plays while the three of them montage through learning how to control their switching so they can work together as one unit and still use their powers at the same time. If there were more, I didn’t notice them. Oh, there’s one more, but it’s technically a spoiler. The score was fine. It was by Laura Karpman, who’s scored a few Marvel things before. I was just distracted the whole time because the main heroic chord that repeated throughout the theme and most of the score sounded quite a bit like the score for the show Chuck.

Cinematography –
The cinematographer in this was Sean Bobbitt, and he did as good a job as you can do for a movie that is 90% CGI and green screen. There were some good shots in this, including one where Captain Marvel just free floats out of her ship and into space. Good job.

Time for some marvelous spoilers!!!

Those are like regular spoilers but even better.

Because these spoilers are about the movie The Marvels!!!

You can’t get more marvelous than that…

But maybe you can?

Maybe I’m not giving myself enough credit. Maybe I need to have more faith in my abilities, more confidence.

Yes, I can make these spoilers more marvelous! I’m going to believe in myself!

So now in order to make these extra marvelous, I will also be including a spoiler from the TV show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which I haven’t seen, but I’ll find something.

But before that, I’m gonna spoil The Marvels! So go away if you don’t want spoileys!

The Marvels Spoiler Review
Okay, so here are the only real spoilers in this movie. At one point, Valkyrie, played by Tessa Thompson, shows up in her “I’m the boss of Asgard” suit to save some Skrull refugees and tell Brie Larson she’s a good superhero. And then Captain Marvel brings her two new friends to a planet that’s mostly water where everybody sings and she’s married to the handsome prince. I like the bit of a planet where everyone sings and I know a lot of people may think it’s tacky and dumb but I wish they’d done more with it. I thought when the Kree showed up the soldiers would have a song or all the other Marvels would sing or something. I don’t know. When the villain goes to steal the sun, Nick Fury and his space station pals realize they have two escape pods left and they won’t fit all the people on the station. Luckily, Goose the Flerken is pregnant and has a bunch of cat babies that can also swallow people without killing them, and there’s a fun scene where the heroes have to help and encourage all of these terrified people to willingly be eaten alive. Hee hee hee. That’s funny stuff.
And at the end, the villain manages to get Ms Marvel’s bangle and does a big energy burst in front of one of those universal jump points and it instantly kills her and opens a hole to another universe, starting an incursion between that one and this one. This is what happened to that dimension Doctor Strange went to to fight himself with music notes. These incursions will seemingly be, based on the ending, what leads to the return of Hugh Jackman in Deadpool 3, and anyone who’s ever been in anything Marvel related made by Fox or otherwise in Secret Wars. It can be done well, and I know people don’t think it has been or will be. But I have some hopes things will turn around. The response to Secret Invasion was so overwhelmingly negative, there’s no way Kevin Feige isn’t going to course correct majorly now that both strikes are over.
Anyway, in order to stop the incursion, Monica Rambeau flies to the other side of the rift to close it and can’t return to our universe, which leaves her stuck. And everyone is sad because she’s gone. Or is she?

Is this a good sequel?
In retrospect, yes. It ties together the narratives of three different characters fairly well and I think it was way better and way more interesting than the first movie. Again, it’s missing stuff. A few glaring things, but it’s good enough where it counts that I don’t care.

What do the post-credits scenes set up for the future of Marvel?
Monica Rambeau wakes up in a hospital bed surrounded by familiar silver-gray walls. Her mother, who was dead, is sitting next to her. Monica soon realizes she isn’t in her universe. Her mom is dressed as a Captain Marvel and doesn’t know who she is. Neither does her companion, a tall blue furry man in a lab coat who sounds like Frasier Crane and knows this is something Charles will want to see. That’s right. Kelsey Grammar finally returned to the role of Beast, the other incredibly posh role he was born to play, and brings with him the Fox X-Men universe. The original one. Now, I understand people hate this. It’s fan-bating of the highest degree. But, my God. The one movie he got to really play that character in was terrible and I’ve always wanted him to come back and have another go, but figured it would never happen, especially now that he’s busy with Frasier revival. I absolutely loved it, so much. Couldn’t be more excited now. If he’s back, you’ve got me.

Should they stop making Marvel movies and shows?
No. No, they should not. As I said above, this is a narrative issue as well as a quality control issue. If they focus more on the narrative and the quality of each piece of the story being good stories on their own, they cannot go wrong. That’s what I say. Superheroes are inherently exciting. This universe is inherently exciting. There’s a vast, rich universe of characters to pull from. And you can say “There’s too much! Enough is enough! Sometimes a story just needs to end!!! Let this story end!” I say, no. As long as they know what story they’re trying to tell. If they can’t find anything in the tank or figure out how to get things back on track, and I do not at all think that will be the case, then they should stop. Otherwise, don’t watch. Don’t pay attention. Let me have my fun. I’ve read thousands of comic books and I read more every week. I think it’s the best kind of storytelling, and when they get these movies right it’s really special. The Spider-Verse movies in particular, because they can so seamlessly visually simulate the comic page. But more on that when we get to the end of year rankings.

Overall Rating – 7.5/10(Perfectly solid movie. I felt much the same way about this that I did No Way Home. I would be equally okay with a movie where these three actresses just sat in a room and had an hour and a half of fun banter.)
Rudd Rating – 0/10(Not even a mention of him this time. Kamala suddenly doesn’t want to talk about her favorite podcaster, huh? They at least had the courtesy to vaguely mention Quantumania in the Loki finale.)

So that’s what I think about The Marvels at the moment. But as you know, opinions are like assholes. They warp and change and take on new shapes as time goes on. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my review! If you want to read more superhero movie reviews, I’ve got a few on here and we’ve still got Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom coming out next month and then I’ll do my end of year superhero ranking. See you then!