The Marvels: The Shortest MCU Movie is in a Bit of a Hurry to Save the Universe
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-
I’ll admit that I felt some glee beforehand at the news that The Marvels – the 217th film in the Marvel Comic Universe (I’m estimating here) – would be the shortest of them all, clocking in at a mere 105 minutes, including the credits!
But I’ll also concede that The Marvels has so much on its plate versus time on its clock, that it is a movie in a hurry. This despite its occasional rest stops of silliness.
Case in point: we’re only about a minute in before we are introduced to the inevitable MacGuffin of Universal Destruction (okay, “Quantum Band”), which every super-hero movie must have, and whose acquisition by the villain must be stopped.
Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) and her fangirl Ms Marvel (Iman Vellani) on the planet of singing people
The Marvels teams up Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), the teenage Kamala Khan/Ms Marvel (Iman Vellani) of Disney+ miniseries fame, and Captain Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), last seen in the Disney+ series WandaVision.
All three have super-powers, none of which make them invulnerable to the demands of filming an MCU movie these days. Every character comes with their back story, which requires exposition and cross-referencing - notwithstanding director Nia DaCosta’s occasional narrative shortcuts (like, say, the use of high-tech memory-sharing ear-buds).
And it wouldn’t be a Marvel movie unless you somehow connect it to the events in Avengers: Endgame, or multiverses, or both.
All of which gets in the way of what should be a relatively simple story of three women getting to know each other while saving the universe.
How they connect is at once the most imaginative part of the movie, and sometimes the hardest to keep track of. Some glitch in space-time has connected these three, so that when any two or more of them use their powers at the same time, they switch places via teleportation.
At the beginning of the movie, Monica is with Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and various agents and engineers in Earth orbit. Carol is fighting the Kree (remember them?), and Kamala is in her room in Jersey City, NJ drawing fan fiction pictures of herself and her hero Captain Marvel kicking butt together.
Soon, the Khan family’s house is dizzyingly invaded and half-destroyed by alien intruders, two separate superheroes and an alien kitty-cat with, um, strange appetites.(More on that in a bit).
The movie’s combination of whimsy and catastrophe sometimes plays like oil and water. The basics of the plot is that the Kree are hugely angry at Captain Marvel for accidentally crippling their planet while intervening between the Kree and the Skrull (longtime Marvel aliens). We’re talking Now-I’ll-destroy-YOUR-planet furious.
And leading the revenge plot is Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), possessor of one of the two Quantum Bands that can wreak havoc on everything everywhere (Kamala, it turns out, has the other. Small universe).
But there’s always time for a laugh, like a visit to the planet Aladna, where people communicate in song and dance, like a Broadway/Bollywood exoplanet. There’s also the cute alien kitties we mentioned and the key point they play in the plot. And there’s playfulness among our three superheroines, when they play games goofing around while teleporting.
It’s a busy movie, and those silly moments tend to underscore how much of too much is going on the rest of the time.
As fleshed-out characters, Carol and Monica barely register. Fangirl Kamala at least brings some life to the game with her unrestrained chatterbox enthusiasm. (As well, the actors playing her parents chew up some scenery when they’re taken to space by Fury for security reasons).
The lighter moments are the best reason to catch The Marvels. Getting a reprieve on the running time is a close second.
The Marvels. Directed by Nia DaCosta. Starring Brie Larson, Iman Vellani and Teyonah Parris. Opens in theatres Friday, November 10.