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| Image courtesy Marvel Studios |
Marvel continues its latest phase with this week's release of The Marvels, its delayed follow-up to 2019's Captain Marvel with three major female leads taking the reins this time around.
As another entry in the long running MCU, the film is just another symptom and product of the fatigue that has been plaguing their films ever since the finale of Avengers: Endgame. Picking up with Kamala Khan and her infatuation with superhero Captain Marvel, we're quickly thrown into another galactic struggle that feels all too familiar and without many stakes whatsoever. A cardboard cutout villain with no ambition but to destroy our hero ultimately makes this another dire chapter in the ever-devolving cinematic universe of a franchise that's now permanently set on rinse and repeat.
The fact that this movie features awful looking action scenes and terribly rendered CGI shows the carelessness behind the production and the creative team's lack of any respect for the audience. The Marvels looks, plays, and has the cheap aesthetic of some of the worst Disney+ television series. The sets look plastic, the action scenes are poorly choreographed, and our lead player ultimately looks bored with the material. Brie Larson is a good actor when given a script to work with. Unfortunately, The Marvels does very little with her talents and offers her nothing but base line dialogue to work with. The three main characters have no emotional connection, making their forced humor cringeworthy and altogether uncomfortable to sit through. An hour and thirty five minutes was way too much for me.
Much like the running gags in Thor: Love and Thunder, we're expected to laugh at the same joke repeatedly. It really gets annoying seeing the same cat gag shoved down our throats to such a point of repetition, it becomes aggravating. Sure, kittens are cute and cuddly. But at the cost of anything considered artistic or smart, it hinders the film beyond repair. And it makes this just another Marvel effort that sets its sights on making people laugh instead of digging into the fact that these folks are at war. Humor can work when properly placed. But can we just remember for one second that these ladies are fighting for the lives of millions of people across the galaxy? Nah. Let's joke some more.
This powerful trifecta of female superheroes should have had something to say. There was a much better way to bring Carol Danvers, Kamala Khan, and Monica Rambeau to the silver screen. The plot devices used in this movie: giant lasers shooting into the sky, alternate realities, and a random power hungry antagonist with a glowing weapon cannot compete with what the MCU has done before. We reached the high point. And now we're at the lowest of the low where Nick Fury isn't even entertaining anymore.
The Marvels is a wooden and stylistically barren all digital byproduct of a corporate studio that has gutted classic characters to bring us another pointless franchise film that oozes greed. There's a reason there's barely any marketing for this movie. It's simply that bad and altogether boring.
-CG