This weekend we finally got to the theater to see The Marvels, which is a movie I’ve been looking forward to for a long time and I did not walk away disappointed. I laughed through most of it because it was either incredibly fun or it just pushed to the point of absurdity.
I’m not writing a spoiler-free thing here, so be warned.
What I remembered about the characters before going in
Carol Danvers is the most powerful person in the MCU, and that’s a problem. She also trained as a pilot for the Air Force and trained to be in control at all times. Her natural state is to be reserved and cautious. She assess situations before responding. She also has made some pretty big promises that she has not kept.
Monica Rambeau blipped, came back to find her mother had died, and spent some time with SWORD until she committed the sin of treating Wanda Maximoff like a human being, getting fantastic powers in the deal.
Kamala Khan is a teenage superhero who is trying to survive being a teenager with her feet in so many separate ponds she needs three or four of herself to keep up. She’s a fangirl of Captain Marvel and the last we saw of her was getting replaced by Captain Marvel in her own bedroom.
My concerns going in
Marvel movies have a history of not being very good about scaffolding the opening of movies. Their storytelling style for several years has been to assume that the audience have watched everything – movies, TV shows, tie-in comics. And we were supposed to have stayed for every post credit tag. The Eternals didn’t do a such a great job of ramping up our relationship to the characters and I’m afraid they’ve gone the way of The Inhumans — conveniently written out of the MCU.
Marvel needs to make way for The Fantastic Four and The X-Men anyway.
Because I have watched everything, I had a challenge letting myself learn fresh who they are. Kamala is a very easy character to understand because she’s the most open in her emotions and reactions. Iman Vellani plays her with such genuine expressions, it’s easy to love her as a character. Her fangirl squee is infectious. Her adulting-up scenes are serious but it’s clear she’s only playing at being an adult. Her introduction certainly had the vibe of her show, including her family relationships.
Monica is shown using her power, reluctantly, but still doing the dangerous “Imma go check out the obvious dangerous mysterious thing I can’t explain”, so she’s got some confidence in herself.
Carol is pulled into a strange situation but gets to punch people fairly quickly, so she’s in her element. The Kree constantly calling her “The Annihilator” is new, though.
The action sequences with them swapping places seems at first random but there is a decent enough explanation to let it pass. It lets them play with it later as a tactic in their training sequence, which is incredibly fun. It’s also nice to see the way all three went into “superhero” mode. Innocents are threatened, they get to work.
Character Arcs
Kamala has two important changes here. One, she has to meet her hero, and then learn that her hero is a human being. Second, she has to stand up to her mother, and her mother is a force to be reconned with.
Monica has to accept that, for better or worse, she’s a superhero now, and she has to sort out the complicated relationship with Carol. From her point of view, Carol abandoned her. She’s a Girl Who Waited who also got on with her life, but that separation and loss in her personal life I think has gotten her to push her personal feelings down. She’s going to be a pro.
Carol has to face Monica, the girl she abandoned and now she has to accept that Captain Trouble is her own person now. She has to deal with the Kree and the Skrulls, peoples she has hurt in the past. The main villain is only the villain because of Carol. The big story line is all her fault, and she knows it. She has to face her shame, and her embarrassment.
It is in the character arcs where I look for the life lessons, on the ground that we read fiction to learn how to be human beings, and a movie is just a novella with a lot of pictures.
Kamala shares a lesson I learned myself a couple of times in my life. Don’t elevate your heroes to gods. I adored the Beatles as a kid, wanted to be one for a while, and when I started reading their biographies I realized how many drugs they took just to survive, and lost some of my fervor for them. There was a person I met in church and thought she was all-wise and all-kind and after a couple of years I learned she was, like everyone else, only human.
Monica’s lesson is one I am struggling to learn.
Carol’s lesson is another one I am struggling with. I have a bad habit of abandoning people in my life. I end relationships without much fanfare. I haven’t seen my goddaughter in years. I get hit with guilt over that a couple of times a year.
The Theme
If I had to pin down a theme, Monica get’s the significant line. Carol admits that she didn’t want to come home with her mistakes hanging over her, and Monica says the great takeaway of the movie:
That’s not how family works.
Monica Rambeau
Carol and Monica are chosen family, Kamala is with her unchosen family. Family is a thing that changes all the time. Kamala’s family is changing with her pending full adulthood and really breaking out on her own, but Muneeba speaks for all mothers everywhere when she says Kamala will always be her child. I think the word used is Betta, but I’m not sure so I don’t want to go on record there. But mothers are mothers, children are children, even when they grow up.
We assume our family is a constant, until our parents leave us, but that’s not fow family works.
The Embarrassing Scene
The whole musical interlude was just plain silly. I could see such a civilization existing, and Carol’s obvious discomfort is wonderful to watch. Watching Kamala just enjoy the hell out of it, even though they know they are there with bad news and about to fight, she just lives in the moment. Carol goes full Disney Princess, giving cosplayers around the world new inspiration. (I wouldn’t be surprised if they got inspiration from a cosplayer doing Carol as a proper Disney Princess.)
It was just silly, and short, so it didn’t overstay its welcome. They got back to the action fairly quickly.
Nitpicks
There are a couple of nitpicks, naturally.
Aamir’s wife was mostly absent. He was recording a call to her, apparently, but she was invisible. Bruno was absent, too. However, this is not a Ms. Marvel story, but an ensemble, and Kamala has a large supporting cast while Carol and Monica have … (checks notes) Nick Fury and a flerkin, and they have to share Fury. I can understand limiting the extra characters to her immediate family, and her interactions with her brother are wonderful.
I also didn’t believe Muneeba would suggest to Aamir that a house in Louisiana would be a great place to raise a family, only because she doesn’t strike me as the kind of mom and future grandmother who wants them to live that far away from her home in New Jersey.
But the big one, which only rose up after really thinking about the whole thing, is how Kamala became a Carol Danvers fangirl to begin with. Carol left earth in the 80s or 90s, long before Kamala was alive. She didn’t spend a lot of time on Earth. She was featured in AvengerCon in the TV series, but still, how much about her life was made public?
But that’s also the kind of overthinking a fan can do, so I have to let them use some handwavium here.
The blocking in the final battle was a bit tough to follow, but it was also fast and didn’t drag and even in the end, the villains primary goal gets met, which shows the conflict was never good vs evil but how she tried to solve her problem was horribly stupidly selfish and wrong.
The End
Was I satisfied by this ending? Hell yes. There was a one-shot comic a few years ago during Kelly Thompson’s latest run on Captain Marvel where Carol reigniting a sun, so I was fully prepared to see her die. I don’t know how Brie Larson’s contract is going (nor do I care) but it would have been a fitting end for the character overall. Again, she’s so damn powerful she’s hard to keep in balance in a story.
Losing Monica like that didn’t kill her, and we know it’s a comic book movie, so no one is really dead. Her loss still hit hard, though.
The Tag
Well, I wasn’t expecting that, and I’m not quite happy with the casting, but it’s not my decision. I’m afraid if this is how they try to get that the X-Men into the MCU, it’s only going to confuse everything.
Should you go see The Marvels?
Hell yes.