Now Watching: The Marvels

Is Marvel or ‘superhero’ fatigue really a thing? I think so, but not in the way people usually mean. I don’t think the problem is one of quantity, but quality. With the exception of Guardians of the Galaxy 3, much of Marvel’s recent cinematic outings have been mediocre and forgettable at best, or downright terrible at worst – I’m looking at you, Love & Thunder. So it’s not a surprise to me that The Marvels flopped when preceded by such a string of disappointments.

And it’s even less surprising when you factor in that other aspect of Marvel ‘fatigue’ – the shared universe in which everything exists to set up or to be set up by everything else. The Marvels is a film with three main characters – Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel and Monica Rambeau. But if you’ve not seen the two Disney+ series which introduced Ms. Marvel or Monica, The Marvels does a terrible job of establishing who they are or what they can do.

The film begins as if it expects the audience to already be familiar with these two characters. We get a fast flashback montage for Captain Marvel which, frankly, is an awful and lazy way to reintroduce the character, but Ms. Marvel and Monica get nothing. And they were the two characters that really needed to be established for the audience because not everyone will have seen the Ms. Marvel series or WandaVision in which Monica was introduced.

Ms. Marvel with her energy and enthusiasm is easily the best thing about The Marvels, but I already liked the character because I liked her in her own series. But for anyone who hadn’t they probably wouldn’t have a clue who she was or why she was here. As for Monica, she was only a supporting character in WandaVision so she needed even more time to be established and introduced. But we get nothing. If you’re not already familiar with these characters then you’re shit out of luck because the film doesn’t want to take the time to set them up.

Or did it? The Marvels is unusually short for a Marvel film and all throughout the first 40 minutes or so I kept feeling like I was missing scenes. There are some jarring hard cuts during that opening and I’m really curious as to what was lost. The pacing is just too fast, which isn’t a complaint I’d usually make but in The Marvels, which is attempting to combine the content and characters from three different films and Disney+ series (actually, four I guess, if you factor in Nick Fury) it really needed to take it slow and ease the audience in, one character at a time.

Maybe the film did try to do this. Maybe it all just ended up on the cutting room floor. If that’s the case, then it was a terrible decision but that said, that isn’t the only problem with The Marvels. The overall plot just isn’t very exciting or engaging and the villain is terrible.

Now, to be fair, I’m not saying the plot and villain didn’t have potential, but once again, none of it is properly set up or established. The film just rushes along at a breakneck pace and expects the audience to know what’s going, who everyone is and more importantly – to care. But we don’t care. The film hasn’t given us a reason to.

The film can’t quite decide if it wants to be serious or not which doesn’t exactly help the audience invest in the plot or what’s at stake – we go from a harrowing scene in which dozens of people die to our heroes landing on a planet in which everyone is prancing about and singing. At that point, I felt like just giving up and switching off.

But I kept watching because I do like these characters. I like Ms. Marvel and I like Captain Marvel. I don’t know if I like Monica or not because the film gives her absolutely nothing to work with. In fact, none of them really do. What a waste. And then the film ends just as you’d expect – trying to set up the next thing. When will they learn?

4/10