Random Thoughts on The Marvels

Erik

In no particular order. Spoiler warnings in effect.

Erik’s random thoughts:

  • The beginning and ending of this movie felt rushed. The beginning had to get the audience caught up on a bunch of streaming shows that not everyone has seen. The ending felt like it ran out of time to properly wrap up both story elements and emotional beats. As ridiculous and entertaining as the musical number on Aladna was, maybe a minute or two of that runtime could have been better spent on other parts of the movie.
  • Even though we have watched most of the relevant streaming shows (we’ve seen WandaVision and Ms. Marvel; we gave up on Secret Invasion after they fridged their third woman in as many episodes), I still felt as though I was missing out on some backstory. It’s like there’s half a movie we all missed somewhere along the way.
  • Iman Vellani is fantastic as Kamala Khan / Ms. Marvel, and she plays brilliantly off both Brie Larson and Teyonah Parris. Carol Danvers may be drivingf this movie’s story, but Kamala is its big, goofy, awkwardly earnest teenaged heart.
  • I think I counted two white men with speaking roles—three at a stretch if you include the stinger (and not getting into complicated questions about South Asian identities). At the same time, the movie doesn’t make any kind of issue about gender or race; people are just people. We’ve come a long way from the blazing white maleness of Iron Man, even from movies like Black Panther and Captain Marvel which showcased the diversity of their representation and made it a feature of the movie. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is better for reaching a place where a movie full of people who aren’t white men is unremarkable.
  • With Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor: Ragnarok, and now The Marvels, the MCU is fully committing to the idea that space is big, colorful, weird, and often kind of silly, and I love it.
  • It was great to see the heroes find their strength not by force of will or emotional epiphany but with practice, and especially by practicing together.
  • Having flerken kittens tentacle-eat people as an evacuation strategy was already pretty funny, but setting it to a song from Cats was comedy genius.

Eppu’s random thoughts:

  • It’s too bad that I’ve never read any Carol Danvers stories. It seems there’s a lot of potential in the character—or a lot of comic book storylines that could’ve been tapped—but for some reason she hasn’t gotten another movie for herself; hardly any time at all, in fact, even in the movies that she has been in.
  • Like MCU’s Peter Parker (Tom Holland), the new Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) actually feels like a teenager. Good job writing and acting that aspect. (So good, in fact, that we almost gave up on Ms. Marvel the series.) Also Khan’s mother Muneeba (Zenobia Shroff) is a treasure!
  • It’s DELIGHTFUL that we had a proper training montage! I was so satisfied to see how exactly the Marvels figured out how to take advantage of their inadvertent swapping-places-snafu, even to the extent of tagging in and out while juggling.
  • I guess it’s an indication of how few women I’m used to seeing in the MCU that I kept being astonished at how many female characters we got not only to see but to hear. (“She got lines! And she got lines, too!”)
  • Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau felt the most one-dimensional of the three protagonists. Apart from still suffering from Auntie Carol abandoning her in her childhood, what did she have going on in her life? Not much, as I recall. (Well, work, but don’t they all have that.)
  • In the MCU, there’s a distinct testosterone-and-big-guns strain (e.g., the Avengers and Iron Man movies), another that’s kookier but mostly sticks with humans (Ant-Man, Doctor Strange), and a third that’s waaaay out there (Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor: Ragnarok). I used to think there’s room for all kinds of takes, from serious to silly, but at least in The Marvels the different veins seem almost to quarrel. The result is a mix where the various styles pull in different directions and don’t quite cohere. I would’ve wanted to see a higher quality, more polished movie. Perhaps the writers are still recuperating from the cumulative effects of the pandemic and the Hollywood writer’s strike. (I know I haven’t bounced back all the way yet, and I didn’t even have to strike.)

Image: Screenshot from The Marvels via IMDb

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