The Marvels 2023

It’s been nearly a year and a half since my last review on this site and even though I’m writing this on New Year’s Eve, I’m not here to make any New Year’s resolutions about writing more often on this site. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon, I like having this site here even though I’m not updating it on anywhere near a regular basis. But when I take the time to watch a superhero movie, I like having the option to write about it here and the truth is, I actually haven’t really sat down to watch a new-to-me superhero movie in nearly a year and a half. I did attempt to watch this movie several months ago, but I wasn’t able to make it more than a couple minutes in before getting distracted by life and the people in my household. There was also a slight bit of trepidation as I knew that this wasn’t a very well regarded movie in the Marvel canon, but I still had hopes that I would find enjoyment in watching it. And I’m glad that I finally made time to watch this because I was a fan of the Ms Marvel show, Captain Marvel’s movie, and WandaVision where Captain Rambeau gained her powers even though I could never remember what her code name ended up, and it was never decided on within this movie either. I had an absolute blast watching this movie, I laughed many times throughout the runtime and often quite hard. It was fun and funny, and I’m disappointed by how much hate it got on its release.

This movie starts out pretty early on with one of the most fun action sequences in quite a while as Captain Marvel, Ms Marvel, and Captain Rambeau become quantum entangled and end up switching places with each other when two of them use their powers at the same time despite not even being on the same planet. Things get extra complicated when Goose ends up coming along and coughs up a couple Kree in Ms Marvel’s house creating a three pronged fight as the three Marvels keep switching places. This quantum entanglement works well as a good story excuse to force these characters together and they all have a fun dynamic. Ms Marvel is a big fangirl towards Captain Marvel, while Rambeau and Carol have emotional baggage between the two of them. Plus, there’s the general inexperience of Ms Marvel and it all makes for entertaining character dynamics.

The villain of this movie Dar-Benn is a little on the weak side in terms of her character development, though her actual villain plan was on the more reasonable side. It worked well to have Captain Marvel be an unintentional villain of the Kree by way of essentially destroying their planet when she destroyed the Supreme Intelligence in her first movie. While Dar-Benn’s motivations were to restore the Kree homeworld of Hala by way of also getting revenge on Captain Marvel who is known by the Kree as the Annihilator, she ends up creating a slight offshoot of the blue column in the sky that is notorious among many bad superhero movies. This blue column does make a bit more sense in the context of this movie, as she is creating these permanent jump points in order to steal resources from other planets like the air, water, and the sun. But the final conflict between the characters doesn’t ultimately make as much sense as she creates the jump point to steal the Earth’s sun, but it only barely makes a solar flare. And when the Marvels come up with a plan to restore Hala’s sun without any deaths, Dar-Benn makes a futile gesture that causes her death and creates the self-sacrifice moment for Rambeau. Which is a shame because Dar-Benn could have been an interesting villain, but she felt pretty wasted in this movie as a weaker copy of Ronan the Accuser.

What works the most in this movie is the humor, much of it comes from Ms Marvel and her family. But there are plenty of other fun moments throughout. Despite being a rather bizarre choice, the visit to the planet of Aladna where the people their communicate through song and dance was a fun distraction combined with some gorgeous set and costume design to help flesh out the world while Ms Marvel and Rambeau helped keep the situation grounded with their disbelief. The other fantastic scene was the Flerken evacuation where everyone in the space station had to allow themselves to be eaten by the Flerken kittens in order to properly evacuate in the reduced number of escape pods. It was worth it for the comedy despite the fact that the entire space station plotline was underdeveloped and didn’t entirely make sense.

Yes, this movie does have its flaws and potentially a few too many plotlines, but the main core of action comedy with the three main heroines really brought the entertainment. The comedy was funny, and there was a nice bit of occasional dramatic connections between the three leads like during the Skrull disaster where Ms Marvel had to learn in a pretty blunt way that sometimes heroes can’t save everyone. And the reconciliation between Carol and Rambeau over why Carol didn’t return as soon as she should have due to the guilt over becoming Kree’s Annihilator. Nick Fury felt a little wasted, but it’s always fun to have Sam Jackson around, and it was fun to see Ms Marvel play the Nick Fury part in the first post-movie pre-credits scene recruiting Echo as the second member of what will likely become the Young Avengers, despite the fact that at Marvel’s current pace is not likely to happen until all of the Young Avengers make it to their thirties. And despite it being a couple years old at this point, it was still nice to see Kelsey Grammar’s return as Beast to tease bringing the X-Men into the Marvel fold proper. All in all, I’m glad that I chose this movie as my return into watching superhero movies, and while I’m not going to make any empty promises, my New Year’s resolution is to hopefully get back into watching a few more superhero movies and when I do, I plan to continue to write about them right here in this blog. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.