This is the full-on spoiler review of The Marvels. My non-spoiler review is where we broke it down the first time, and it’s where we talked about the Know-It-All Index rating. If you haven’t seen the movie, this is your one and only warning. I don’t normally do this, but I’m letting you know: spoilers.
Man, I tell you what. I didn’t go into this with a whole lot of expectations, and I didn’t go into it with bad ones either. I purposely went in with as clear a conscience, in terms of my thinking, as possible. I’m not going to judge it. I’m going in blind.
I’m not a fan of the original Captain Marvel at all. I saw it in theaters, obviously. I liked some of the things it was doing, but overall it felt very cold and very dispassionate to me back then. Baby Know-It-All and I tried watching Ms. Marvel. We watched the first two episodes and couldn’t really get into it. I normally give things three episodes, but it just wasn’t for me, and according to her it wasn’t for her either. I’ve also seen WandaVision, where we got to see Monica Rambeau get her powers from walking through the hex and all this other stuff. There’s a brief bit of that discussed in the movie, everybody gets their pickup lines, and they move on quick.
They Get You Into the Plot Fast
They get us into the plot pretty fast. Most of the stuff you’ve seen in the trailer, where they’re swapping places in space-time, is very much there. There’s a huge name drop to the cosmic bands. We’re talking Quasar. The bangles, if you will. Apparently Ms. Marvel has one, and later on Dar-Benn has the other one.
Dar-Benn is a very flat villain. But unlike some people who want to just write her off as flat, one-note, whatever, she’s a complex and nuanced villain. They give you her backstory, and that backstory is told through Captain Marvel’s eyes. Apparently, when she went into space at the end of Captain Marvel, one of the things she did was promise she was going to free the Kree. She destroyed the Supreme Intelligence, which is a concept from the comics, and in doing that she sent the entire planet into civil war. All of their resources, everything else, destroyed.
So does it make sense to you? How do you expect her to be? Seriously. Okay, I’m sorry, we’re geeking out. I love this stuff, and I know you do too.
Stop Selling Me the Better Movie
My biggest pet peeve at this point in time: please stop selling me the better movie that happened what we call in comic books either off the page or between the panels.
This movie would have hit so much harder. This should have been Captain Marvel 3. In earlier phases we got Iron Man, Iron Man 2 and Iron Man 3. We knew Tony’s arc. When you get to Iron Man 3 you understand his arc, so that when we finally get ourselves into the Civil War of it all, you understand his motivations. They didn’t do that here. They did no groundwork.
You give me that Captain Marvel movie where we get to see those events, where we get to see her fight the thing and have to make hard choices. Because there are a couple of times when Kamala wants to do something, and Captain Marvel has to dress her down quick, and you see something happening. So Brie Larson’s been given backstory in order, as an actress, to be able to do her job. But we never saw it on the screen. I can conjecture and I can connect the dots like anybody else, but we don’t get to see any of that work, and that was really frustrating. Imagine how much more impact it would have had to see her reignite the Kree sun.
Now, they did do a good job painting the motivation for Dar-Benn. You sit there and you go, oh wow, okay, this makes sense. And it does make sense why she’s called the Annihilator. I don’t like that name, but it makes total sense. What you don’t get to see is any of the healing that happens. So what you get is one-note Carol from the first movie, and now she’s one-note Carol because of something that happened in the middle, in a second movie we never got to see.
Sean Chandler, one of the other reviewers that I watch, had a tweet recently that was literally that. This feels like a sequel to another movie that we never got, a Captain Marvel 2 we should have gotten. This was not Captain Marvel 2. And he’s right. I agree 100%. It’s not Captain Marvel 2, and that’s a shame.
The Musical Planet Works
Some people didn’t like the pauses. First off, I think everything works within the context of what this movie is.
There’s one planet where it’s a musical planet. Literally, they don’t understand you if you’re not speaking in music. It’s fun. It’s a play. I think in the pop culture zeitgeist, because it’s so close to the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds musical, it feels derivative, and I know that’s wrong, because I know this was already planned out and probably even filmed well before that series dropped. People were calling it a bit. I think it’s fine. It worked fine.
To me that was the fun of comic books. You know for a fact you’ve seen crazy comic book species like this. These people only talk in rhyme, these people only talk in this and that, these people only talk in song. And how awesome was it to see Iman Vellani essentially doing her best Bollywood impression, dancing to all the colorful everything? It was great. I loved it.
You Told Us, You Did Not Show Us
How much better would it have been for us to see any of this legwork? Any of it. You literally could have ended the Captain Marvel 2 movie with her talking to this guy she met, the prince guy. He’s a friend, they fought together, maybe he was on the little team. And he says, I don’t know, maybe something you can help me with, my mom. Now it pays off in this one and you go, oh. And then the thing between the lines is them having had to get married and the whole bit. That would have made tons of sense to me.
Instead there’s all this callback to stuff we’ve never seen. And the problem is, I know I should care, because you did a good job, writers of this movie, explaining to us that these are all things we should care about. You told us. You did not show us. And that’s a failure. That is a failure of Kevin Feige. That is a failure of the movie people over at Marvel. An utter failure.
The Flerkens
I definitely enjoyed where this movie went, and I love some of the things we got to see. We got to see the Supreme Intelligence that looked like the Supreme Intelligence. And there’s a bit with the Flerkens.
Dar-Benn is essentially stealing resources to rebuild Hala, and eventually she goes to Earth to take our sun. The space station Nick Fury’s on, S.A.B.E.R., is going to crash, and there’s no way to get enough escape pods out for everybody, for 300 people. It just so happens the McGuffin of the Flerken cat is having a litter.
I feel like it’s a little convenient, but I do see the breadcrumbs they tried to lay down. It’s eating an awful lot. It’s eating more than it should. Then you see Kamala Khan’s mom say it looks a little pudgy, you should back off feeding her. And then, poof, you find out it’s giving birth to little brain-looking eggs.
All of that was a really long setup to have the Flerkens eat the crew of the S.A.B.E.R. space station in order to help evacuate them faster. Oh my God. I got it, because you can more easily wrangle a family of cats than you can rescue 300 individuals. Whatever.
I think that was the second thing everybody tried to say was a bit. I didn’t have a problem with it. If you look at everything within the context of how ridiculous some of the other things are in the comic books we consume, this was fun. It was light-hearted. Overall I liked the story, and I liked what we got.
There Was No Incursion
Then you get to the very, very end of this thing, and you get to see Monica, Spectrum, save the day using the cosmic bangles. They power her up and she goes through.
Everyone online was like, there’s an incursion, there’s an incursion. There was no incursion. There was a hole in space. An incursion is literally when two celestial bodies, specifically in this instance Earths from other universes, show up and start going to crash into one another. One of them’s going to survive and one of them’s not. That is not what happens here. They punched a hole in space and you could see another Earth.
So what does she do? She has to go to the other side. They power her up to seal it, she seals it up, boom. And you get this really nice coda where they basically make it out that Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel is going to safeguard the house and stuff like that until Monica comes back.
Kate Bishop, Binary, and Kelsey Grammer’s Beast
The first scene is Kamala playing her version of Nick Fury. She’s putting together a team, and it’s very reminiscent of the Nick Fury scene. And it’s Kate Bishop. So she’s like, we’re putting together a team, right now it’s just you and me, but can you do it, please? Okay. So she’s going to be a thing.
Then you finally get to the mid-credits scene, because there is nothing at the very end. It’s Monica waking up, and she wakes up on this other Earth, and she thinks it’s her mom who’s there. Binary has now entered the battle. That was an interesting callback.
And then we got the callback all you leakers and spoilers saw. Big ups to the Geeky Cast. Those guys are always on top of their game, and I absolutely love them over there. Chad and the others, you guys are the best. They were the ones who told me first. I heard it from them before anybody else, and I mean anybody else, no matter whose time to shine it might be.
We get the cameo from Beast. It’s Kelsey Grammer’s Beast. Now, it’s not the same exact Beast, in that this one is a little more CGI, but it looks very well put together. I feel like this is kind of a hint at what, potentially, their X-Men may end up looking like. But it’s Kelsey Grammer for sure. He’s shirtless, he’s wearing the Beast bottoms, the X-Men bottoms with the belt, and he’s got a lab coat on and glasses. He couldn’t have come out of the ’90s cartoon better. He even mentions Charles and the whole bit.
So she’s in an X universe. I do not want to say she’s in the Fox X universe or whatever this past one is. She’s in an X universe, and I’m okay with that.
The Verdict
The Marvels is a 7.5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
It got a seven and a half out of 10 from me because I enjoyed it. I had fun. It did not get better because the movie kept trying to offer me stuff that did not make sense. I can piece it together, because I’m smart, Mr. Know-It-All. But I can’t forgive you and give you a better rating than that.
I’d love to hear your Know-It-All Index scores. What did you think of the movie, and of the whole thing? And if you haven’t had a chance to see it yet, why in the world did you read this beforehand? The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
