Marion G. Harmon, A Writer in Vegas.

Last Monday, I and a friend who have made a ritual of catching every Marvel Movie in the theater together went and caught The Marvels. Preparing for it, I did my usual thing which is to completely ignore all pre-release hype and post-release criticism; I try and see each new movie with no preconceptions of positions.

So, how was it? Well . . . It had some fun scenes and great lines. I liked the main characters, particularly Kamala Khan, Ms. Marvel. Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers also got better in The Marvels (this time she wasn’t written as so stoic/heroic that she was barely a human being). But the story was all over the place. And for a short run-time movie it wasted a lot of screen time on a funny but nonsensical side story (Ms. Marvel’s family, space station, flurricans). Which is too bad, because you can see the epic core in the middle of all of this, which was a Captain Marvel redemption story. Here’s the basic plot:

SPOILER WARNING

Captain Marvel ended with with Carol Danvers in full possession of her memories and full knowledge of just how screwed up (i.e., fascist) the Kree Empire is. The movie has her setting out to help the Skrull find a new homeworld. We now learn that, in addition to that, she decided to liberate the Kree from their tyrannical overlord, the Supreme Intelligence. SI had been running the empire for a thousand years, using the ongoing “Skrull War” as an excuse for governing under martial law. Being a soldier not a politician, Captain Marvel decided to do it by simply returning to Halla and destroying the Supreme Intelligence. The Kree would be free!

Yeah . . . that didn’t work out.

Instead the historically predictable thing happened; immediate empire-wide civil war. The Kree used up/destroyed so many resources fighting to keep the empire together that in the end they’d damaged their star, poisoned their air, and . . . dried up their oceans? Seriously, the ecological disasters didn’t make a whole lot of sense. The Kree called Captain Marvel the Destroyer after this, even though she herself only liberated them and they rather predictably destroyed themselves (she sort of blamed herself anyway).

So in The Marvels, enter The Villain, Dar-Benn: a Kree-Supremacist who decided to pick up where Ronan the Accuser (the main villain of Guardians of The Galaxy) left off, even getting hold of his long-handled maul to use as her weapon and symbol. After ending the civil war (you can bet not pleasantly) she has found a way to open gates through which she can rob a planet of its atmosphere or ocean, or a star of its stellar matter, to siphon off to restore Halla and Halla’s dying star. But since she’s The Villain, she can’t just pick uninhabited worlds or systems to strip materials from, she’s got to do it to worlds important to the Destroyer—including Earth’s star of course. In the end The Marvels defeat her. And Captain Marvel decides to use her Stronger Than God levels of power to restore Halla’s dying star. Because she’s Just That Powerful.

So it had an epic core plot, and it had some good moments. But . . . This is one of those shows where you have to say that the writing was just bad. It really was, but I felt for the writers; they were obviously operating with some producer-imposed instructions as to who needed to be in the movie, at least. Because throwing Ms. Marvel and Monica Rambo into the mix heavily diluted the through-line of the movie. Personally, I think Ms. Marvel made for a great addition, and she had a decent character arc. Monica Rambo, on the other hand, only had her childhood connection to Carol Danvers, experienced no character arc, and was completely extraneous to the plot. Not a bad character, just a bad addition to the story. The whole space station arc was also completely extraneous, as fun as moments of it were.

And on a final note of criticism; Dar-Benn’s motivation had been to restore Halla and especially Halla’s star, something that she needed to destroy another star to do. So you would think that restoring a dying star would be a big, epic moment, wouldn’t you? Nope; the directors basically had Captain Marvel fly into the star and . . . that’s it. She flies in, the star brightens, hooray! To quote one review site, “Super-easy! Barely and inconvenience.” They should have at least spent an extra minute or two establishing that this is a super-big thing that even Captain Marvel didn’t know she could do and just about kills her in the process. But they didn’t and it felt like No Big Deal. Anticlimactic.

So if I’m forced to give The Marvels a rating, I’ll have to say . . . 3 out of 5 Stars. It was better than Love & Thunder, worse than Quantumania. Not Marvel’s worst movie (that would be The Eternals), but continuing the trend of superhero movies that didn’t exactly thrill or inspire.

So, back to working on Capes. Working hard, mostly finished, don’t ask.

MGH