(courtesy IMP Awards)
With yet another superhero movie in the form of The Marvels beckoning us to cinemas, and a few more on the way including the upcoming DC tentpole, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, it’s likely a good time to ask whether audiences are collectively over watching superhumanly empowered being duking it out over yet another to the universe/reality/Earth or whatever the hell is squarely in the avaricious eyes of the villain du jour.
There is some sense they maybe, that by filling schedules near to overflowing with Avengers and aliens and titanic struggles for existence that perhaps the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and to a far less sent the DC Universe, have simply overstayed their heroic welcome.
Whether or not that’s the case, it’s fair to argue that the sheer volume of stories set in the MCU particularly is wearing people out, part of a wider deluge of streaming content that fills the devices of our choice with more TV shows and movies that we can possibly watch in a lifetime, let alone a year.
It’s near impossible to walk into lots of movies at the moment without having devoted countless hours to previous storylines involving that film’s central characters, and while that can be richly rewarding, it can be intimating and not a little overwhelming for time-poor people simply looking for some easy entertainment.
To get some idea of the pre-watch commitment that these movies require, The Marvels potentially required audience members to have watched roughly 5 hours of WandaVision (2021), about 5-6 hours of Ms. Marvel (2022) and the just over two-hour running time of Captain Marvel (2019), not to mention other MCU properties which tangentially touched on these characters.
If you’re a half-glass-full kind of person, you’d simply see this as enriching the viewing of a movie you’ve been excitedly anticipating but the truth is that while we all want to do what we have to make the most of a viewing experience, it can feel like a lot simply getting ready to go and see a film.
All that aside, and let’s be fair, it’s a lot to digest in and of itself, The Marvels can stand alone as its own film.
While there’s a benefit to watching the previous films, and you’d be well ahead on expositional points, the writers have done a fine and elegantly disciplined job – unlike many MCU epics, The Marvels comes in at a lithe and perfectly judged 105 minutes – of crafting a story that doesn’t rely solely on what you know going in.
It helps that while two of the characters know each other – Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) are aunt and niece in what one observer remarks is a typically complicated family) – none of the three members of the accidental superhero team that forms the narrative and emotional nucleus of the film (Ms. Marvel aka Kamala Khan is the third, played by the irrepressibly buoyant Iman Vellani) have actually worked together.
This fact provides plenty of opportunities for gap-filling expositional montages and flashbacks, none of which are overused or overstay their welcome, as they get to know each other as people – for reasons best left to the viewing, there’s an estrangement between Carol and Monica of many years standing – and as superhero colleagues who together must defeat Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), a relatively one-note vengeful type who’s determined to make the galaxy pay for wrongs done to her people, the Kree.
While the battle to defeat Dar-Benn, who to be fair does have some legitimate grievances even if her means of addressing them are suspect at best, and ruinously violent at worst, is pretty much paint-by-numbers MCU standard and won’t really occupy much of your heart and mind (though the visuals are spectacular so kudos to the wielders of CGI in this film), it’s the relationship building and bonding between the three main characters that will really capture your attention, seize your heart and comprehensively tickle your funny bone.
In short, the way Carol, Monica and Kamala come together is a joy, powered by the sheer youthful awkward exuberance of Ms. Marvel who has long dreamt of being “twinsies” with Captain Marvel and who can’t believe that she’s not only met her but that they are fighting on the same side.
In space. With tentacle-producing, cat-shaped Flerkens and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson).
Way to go blow an excitable teenager aspirational superhero’s mind, which it does, and while it feels like The Marvels is throwing a LOT at the plot, it’s done with such vivacious enthusiasm and garrulous excitement that you go right along with it.
It helps too that the film is ridiculously funny.
Yes, there are many fight scenes – it’s the MCU! There’s only so much formula busting that can be tolerated, thank you – and people die and some terrible things happen but their emotional weight and substance is never impinged on or diminished once by the bubbly hilarity that pours out of every relevant narrative pore.
Detailing them in any detail would be blast far too deep into star-filled spoiler territory but suffice to say that while most MCU films look like a disapproving Christian spinster aunt at a stripper joint, all serious intent and no shred of jollity, The Marvels is more than happy to let the outright silliness of many scenes express itself without reservation.
Much humour is also mined by the fact that the three superheroes find their light-based powers somehow entangled, a messily inconvenient development that means that every time any of them use their powers, they swap places instantly with the others, all of which makes for some hugely amusing moments even in the midst of some very intense fight scenes.
Neatly and entertainingly balancing the super serious and the gushingly funny and the heartfelt – so relationally centred is the film that you walk out feeling and buoyed, a consequential state of being that very much MCU films ever achieve in full or in part – The Marvels is one of the best films from the dominant superhero comics universe to come along in some time, and while it may have got off to a sluggish start box office (for all those reasons at the start of the review … or who knows, something else?), it deserves well because it defies the usual formula, or enough of it anyway and places people not events at the heart of its storytelling, something the rest of the franchise could do more than pay lip service to going forward.