Despite the notable lack of PR blitz around its release, The Marvels is easily the MCU film I’ve most looked forward to this year. Three excellent characters getting tied together for a space-bound team-up that brings wider audiences in contact with the effervescent Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani)? Yes, please.
[Minor spoilers for The Marvels]
We’re thrown into the action as Supremor Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) gets her hands on the twin to the bangle that belongs to Kamala. She wants the pair in order to enact terrible revenge and restore her people; the Kree have not been doing well since Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) came back to Hala and destroyed the Supreme Intelligence following the events of the first Captain Marvel film. But their activities clue Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) in on something fishy, so he sends Carol to check on it. At another site, Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) is also looking in to some anomalies around jump points in space, and when Monica touches the thing, something funky goes down—every time Monica, Carol, or Kamala (who’s at home in Jersey trying to avoid doing homework in favor of day-dreaming about meeting her hero, Captain Marvel) use their powers simultaneously, they swap places.
This causes a lot of fighting in space to drop right into the Khans’ living room as mother Muneeba (Zenobia Shroff), father Yusuf (Mohan Kapur), and brother Aamir (Saagar Shaikh) are forced to defend their house from Kree soldiers who accidentally zap over with superwomen they’ve never met before. Fury rightly decides that he’s going to need to bring the whole family in on this in order to secure Kamala’s participation in whatever is going on right now. Monica is less than thrilled because she hasn’t seen Carol since her aunt departed to space when she was a child, and is understandably pretty hurt about that.
The dynamic between Danvers, Rambeau, and Khan once they are united make the film an absolute joy to watch all the way down, allowing for heartfelt conversations, Kamala fan-girling all over the place and having to remember that heroes are people, and a dazzling team of women learning how to support one another in the midst of a fraught race against the clock. The montage where the group take time to learn how to swap places effectively is easily one of the best training montages a superhero film has put out, complete with juggling and endless rounds of double-dutch.
The only problem with this setup is one increasingly common to Marvel films these days: Dar-Benn’s rage is entirely warranted, and the film has to go to ridiculous lengths to cartoon-up her villainy in order to prevent the audience from sympathizing with her. (They succeed, which is an even greater shame, as amusing as it is to watch Ashton—who is engaged to Loki actor Tom Hiddleston—also getting to shout “Kneel!” at the masses and wield a hammer of her own.) It turns out that when Carol stopped the Supreme Intelligence from running Kree society, there was no backup, aid, or reconstruction plan—she simply pulled the plug and left. As a result, their homeworld of Hala is in shambles, and no attempt at deprogramming an entire culture run on misinformation and fear has been attempted. The Kree refer to Carol simply as “The Annihilator,” and there is nothing to suggest that she doesn’t live up to that moniker from their perspective.
The film seems to be gesturing at a commentary around the problem of destroying bad systems when there is nothing planned to take their place (and interestingly, Loki’s second season also made a point of circling this thought, albeit with far more actual conversation between characters), but we’re at a very pointed deficit here—because Carol hasn’t had a film since 2019, and has only shown up in the MCU to make glorified cameos otherwise. Through no fault of its own, The Marvels makes it very hard to sympathize with its central hero because the MCU hasn’t let us get to know her half so well as her male counterparts. If the studio were showing Thor or Iron Man levels of investment, we would feel more for Carol at the reveal that she’s become an entire culture’s boogie man and has been trying (and failing) to make up for it ever since. But the lack of check-ins all this time makes her out to be as distant as Monica has felt since Aunt Carol left.
We get plenty of reprieves despite that significant error on Marvel Studios’ part, most of them revolving around Kamala and her family. The choice to put said family front and center, hanging out with Nick Fury and making things awkward for him on the S.A.B.E.R. station because they’re civilians and he’s just deputized their teenaged daughter, is a setup for comedy gold that never fails. It’s worth noting that the film puts in a few very deliberate nods to the family’s Muslim faith with a clear aim to fight social stigma—toward the end of the film, Kamala’s brother begins to pray during a rough ride in space, Fury asks if that’s indeed what he’s doing, and when Aamir asks if he should stop, Fury tells him no because they need all the help they can get. He then proceeds to throw his own “Amen!” on top of it. The whole thing is charming as all get-out.
When the film leans on fun, everything seems right in the MCU, and it thankfully aims for that more often than not. There’s the aforementioned montage, Kamala’s fan-fiction and Monica’s awareness that the kid definitely writes it, a surprise solution with Goose and an army of flerken kittens, and even a trip to a world called Aladna… where people can only understand your words if they are strung on a melody, and Carol turns out to have a secret husband (played to unperturbed perfection by Park Seo-joon, and seriously where is the movie where that marriage went down, come on).
The Aladna sequence is one of the best in the film, and provides me with another more minor complaint—commit to the bit, Marvel. Once the denizens of the planet are revealed to sing instead of speak, I was so ready for a half-hour musical. It’s disappointing to only get a fun taste and then rocket away for another fight. In many ways, the whiplash can’t help but feel like tension between the creatives and the studio, like someone is standing over the production, tapping folks on the shoulder and pointing at their watch—we should be in battle by now.
Fine! Where’s my singing battle sequence? Commit.
Having said that, this film also contains the only legal use of the “Memory” from the musical Cats. And no, I don’t mean the term to denote literal legality, I mean legal as in, it gets my rabid stamp of approval because it is the only time in history when the song’s use has been warranted, well-executed, and so funny that I almost bruised a rib laughing. All other uses of the song should be banned, including its use in the musical itself. I suppose that would spoil the joke, however, so I guess I’ll have to allow for the continued use of the song elsewhere.
Hiccups aside, The Marvels is a delightful journey that’s high on laughs, space-faring adventure, and three women who deserve a lot more attention from the MCU. Is it also nice to watch Nick Fury get to have some fun after the absolute slog of Secret Invasion? You bet. Am I upset that no one ever mentions what is going to be done to fix up the Khans’ home after that alien attack? Extremely. (I know it’ll all get fixed up off-screen, but collateral damage! It’s never addressed in a way that’s meaningful. Having your home destroyed in a sudden blitz that you never knew to prepare for is traumatizing!) All of this to say, get to the theater and enjoy, because they don’t make enough of them like this.
Emmet Asher-Perrin really demands an extended musical section. You can bug them on Twitter and Bluesky, and read more of their work here and elsewhere.
Everyone seems so quick to declare this film a disastrous bomb because it’s the lowest-opening MCU movie ever (and no doubt because there are always people eager to declare the failure of female- and POC-led films), but if you look at the context, moviegoing in general is down these past few months. The Marvels’ opening-weekend box office as a percentage of the combined weekend BO is proportionally about the same as Barbie’s was.
Plus, the film is handicapped by the fact that the actors weren’t free to promote it until just days ago. But I’m seeing extremely positive word of mouth on social media, and it’s got an 84% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, so hopefully it’ll build an audience over time.
“The Marvels” is my favorite Marvel film since “No Way Home”. It is a great combination of humor, heroics. and storytelling. It is not perfect and you really should see “Ms. Marvel” first, but as a Marvel film this was better than I expected and better even than almost any of the other recent films or shows. (Loki season 2 is also great.)
And I really loved the closing scene with the surprising cameo. NO, not that one. The one before that one. Kamala in the chair was hilarious and makes me eager to see what she is up to next.
Forget whatever you are reading about low box-office. See this movie. It’s great.
I’m with you on pretty much all points. I enjoyed the movie, but it wasn’t the best thing I’ve ever seen. Any time the three leads were on screen together was awesome, and I want to see more of them. Carol’s story absolutely could have used more room to breathe. It feels like we jump from her confession to forgiveness with very little in between. She gets overshadowed in what should be her movie.
Side note: Was there a white guy with a speaking part? Dar-Benn’s aide and the Skrull Emperor were both played by white guys, but it’s kind of hard to tell. That’s kinda cool.
I might’ve misinterpreted that final scene, but I took the family’s appearance at the Rambeau house in Louisiana, and some statements made, to mean that they were relocating there… which would be all kinds of weird if so, because Kamala always makes a BIG deal about being from Jersey City and protecting its locals.
Some friends asked me to review it for them, and it was tough to do so. I loved the film. It was a delightful romp, the 1:45 runtime was perfect instead of the usual 2.5-3 hour slots, and it felt like such a breath of fresh air from so much of phase 3 & 4. But I also told them not to go see it because I know that they wouldn’t have liked it, just like I know that it’s probably going to get ripped and poked at by so many others, and for all of the wrong reasons. Which is pretty damned sad to me. I don’t want every super hero movie to be the same, with the same plots and formats but just swapped out characters.
Great movie. More self contained than most Marvel movies, and didn’t take itself too seriously. I loved the Planet Bollywood aka Aladna sequence. And the kitten high jinx was great. Capt Marvel got some much needed humanizing as the three heroes interacted. Kamala Khan should be in every Marvel movie going forward.
“Dar-Benn’s rage is entirely warranted” I can not agree here at all, and it was one of my biggest problems with the film.
Carol destroys the Supreme Intelligence, yes, but it’s stated multiple times (by Dar-Benn herself) that the Kree destroy themselves through an apocalyptic Civil War. Dar-Benn’s rage is the blind lashing out of a zealot that refuses to self-reflect and see that the destruction around them is a consequence of their own actions (or their societies’ actions).
Was Carol reckless, could she have worked on a better plan to politically overcome the Big Giant Head? I guess, maybe? But in her defense, if she was any other hero in any other storyline in this universe the “Punch the problem away” response would have been the correct answer. When Stark nuked the hive mind of the Chitarri in Avengers, did he think about “Will all these disconnected soldiers fly into a feral rage and attack everything in sight like animals or begin fighting each other creating an even worse hellish warzone?” No, that’s not how these stories work. You find the central controlling bad-guy and punch it until the problem is fixed. Except that didn’t work this time.
Carol did not pollute Hala’s skys or poison their water or extinguish a star – the Kree did that. Then they found a scapegoat. Then they used that self-imposed damage to justify crimes against completely uninvolved innocents. And they’re never called out for it.
Also, yes the use of “Memories” is one of the best things to happen. Like in general in the world.
#5 Halibuli – At first I also thought the Khans were moving into Monica’s house at the end, which would not make any sense at all. But I think it was supposed to be that they were helping Carol move in, to have a base on Earth and hold the place “until Monica comes back”.
Loved it. Really all the male-centric Marvel films since the blip have been crap (Thor, Dr Strange, Ant-Man) and the female-centric ones (Wakanda and this one) have been great. I wonder if it’s been talked-down because of it being female-centric? It was fun, funny, and didn’t rely on you having read the comics written fifty years ago in order to follow the plot. It was well-written, well acted, and beautifully shot. Great film.
@8: There are A LOT of people still salty over the success of the first Capt. Marvel movie.
This was a fun movie if you went to see it, but I can see why a lot of people weren’t compelled to go to the theatre for it. Of the three leads, only Kamala really had a story arc that made you wonder what was next for her.
Having the three women constantly swap places was fun and added zest to the battle scenes and training montage.
I did think the power levels were a bit confusing; Captain Marvel can fly through space at apparent warp speed (or at least fast enough to get to jump points in reasonable time) and smash through Kree battleships, but somehow can’t instakill two random Kree warriors whose can’t even beat the Khan family?
The mid-credits scene was funny, but on reflection seemed very meta. Like the “Rogers: The Musical” musical from the Hawkeye series, it implies that the characters within the MCU have nearly the same narrative-level understanding of what happened in previous movies –and their mid-credits scenes — as the audience watching the movie.
@10/jeffronicus: By this point, there’s probably a series of in-universe biographical movies about the adventures of the MCU’s publicly known superheroes — or at least books like Scott Lang’s.
Sort of like how in the comics, there’s an in-universe Marvel Comics that publishes fictionalized versions of the heroes’ adventures — true to life in the case of public heroes like the Fantastic Four, but substituting conjectural civilian identities for people like Spider-Man and Daredevil who have secret identities.
It’s been 28 years, give or take, from the events of CAPTAIN MARVEL and this movie, and Carol hasn’t cleaned up her mess with the Kree home world? I’m glad this movie is getting some good word of mouth despite the bashing from the fanboys and some reviewers if for no other reason that the young actress from MS MARVEL is so enthusiastic. She deserves a better movie than she got.
@12/MByerly: Did the movie establish how much time passed between the destruction of the Great Intelligence and the culmination of the civil war that devastated Kree? (I haven’t seen it, and am freely spoiling myself.) Maybe it took a number of years. And Carol’s been busy cleaning up messes all over the galaxy (galaxies?), particularly during the Blip years. She’s basically the most powerful superhero in existence, so she’s no doubt in pretty high demand.
It always bothered me in SF stories when aliens tried to steal water from terrestrial planets instead of comets or what have you. This is the first story I’ve seen where they’re deliberately doing that out of pure spite.
I agree with quantumz@7, Dar-Benn’s rage may be understandable (she saw her world fall apart) but is not justified: the Kree did this all to themselves, and on a ridiculous scale too. I mean, they killed a sun.
Plus, she would be sympathetic if she were just putting at risk the neural network by taking the resources she needs from literally anywhere in the galaxy (like, once you got teleportation between star systems, water is free, and if you have water then you have oxygen too). She becomes a generic Marvel villain the moment she gets the air, water, and magic sun stuff from inhabited planets just to hurt back at Carol, and becomes utterly unredeemable and boring when she refuses the help that would actually fix her planet’s most immediate problem. She’s a zealot and she’s fine with it, and so ends up being just a B-side version of Ronan with a smaller hammer.
And that circles to my main gripe with the movie, and most of the latest Marvel production in general: the dramatic moments don’t gel with the funny ones. As the article says, if you really gotta go from killing refugees to a Disney singing planet, why not have a singing, dancing battle too? And why don’t we even get to see that the planet is getting better, but we only hear about it from a side character in a blink-and-you-miss-it moment in the denouement? The movie tells me I should feel the dramatic weight of Carol failing to stop genocide, but we spend so little time on it that it ends up being more like scene setting and an excuse to go from point A to point B than anything else.
Which is a damn pity because I think the three main characters work extremely well together, and Iman Vellani in particular is an international treasure, bringing raw feeling and enthusiasm to every scene she’s in. I just with they had been given a better script to work with.
You know, you blow up one sun, and suddenly everyone expects you to walk on water.
One of the things I loved was how unashamedly girly/female gaze it was. Even moreso than Birds of Prey.
Someone on Tumblr said there are more cats in this movie than white men, which may be why the usual suspects have been trying to bury it.
It was candy-floss fluff, and while some parts don’t hold up to much scrutiny, I was grinning like a loon the whole time.
Iman Vellani is a gem. Halfway through the film, I thought that if movie novelisations were still a thing, it should be written in Kamala Khan’s voice. Then I realized that AO3 will be swarming with them within a few weeks. Though, if Marvel has any smarts, Kamala Khan’s History of the MCU will soon be a thing.
@1/Christopher: I completely agree. I saw a Stephen King tweet the other day that expressed bafflement at the way people looked to put the movie down. People who downright gloat with glee while doing so. Celebrating the failures of other people’s work is why social media can be a drag.
I’ve also seen around takes over the diminishing box-office returns, and one of them points out that losing the Chinese market had a lot to do with these lower figures (for a number of reasons, Ukraine included).
I’m the first one to say The Marvels is far from perfect. The movie is way too short. And the way it jumps from set piece to set piece is almost jarring. You don’t quite feel the progression of the character arcs. I can only imagine how much valuable material was left in the cutting room. This is a movie that would benefit tremendously from a longer director’s cut. We needed to see more development of the individual pieces, especially the way Carol Danvers and Monica Rambeau grew apart and learned to work together. There’s not nearly enough tension there. What little there is gets quickly resolved with a hug between them and Kamala. That’s not enough. There needed to be a more longer lasting, seething tension between them, not unlike the Tony Stark/Steve Rogers conflict of the Avengers era.
And I don’t think that’s a script problem. I’m pretty certain this is a Bog Iger problem. I can easily imagine Disney executives ordering Feige and company to trim the film down as a response to the ongoing media criticism over 3 hour superhero movie lengths (and also cut back on the drama, and prioritize the fun side of the film).
At the same time, I feel Iger created the problem when he decided to create Disney+, forcing Feige to spread himself thin over more projects than anyone needed. You’d think after the worldwide success of Panther, Infinity War and Endgame, that these executives would learn to stay silent and let Feige do the work without interference. But as they say: “you’re only as good as your last hit”. I can imagine the negative Quantumania coverage cost him that much.
For what it’s worth, I still think The Marvels is the best MCU outing in years (also Guardians 3, but I think that’s a carryover from the more stable established era – and Gunn seemingly does no wrong). Definitely a major improvement over Secret Invasion and also recent misfires like Thor 4 and Quantumania. A lot of that can be attributed to Kamala Khan. She was a revelation last year on her show, and making her part of this trifecta provided a lot of the fun and joy to be had in this one.
The VFX could definitely need some more work (here’s hoping the union talks move forward), but I was dazzled by the constant teleporting between the three of them and the way it was used as a battle strategy. I wish the movie had spent more time in Aladna – the movie could have easily spent another 5 minutes in an extended musical. What we got was gold.
And speaking of music, give the best score Oscar to Laura Karpman. They have found the successor to Alan Silvestri. Her score is the best MCU score since Endgame. Not only capable of carrying the work from Miss Marvel to the big screen, she also successfully crafts motifs that interact directly with the Silvestri Avengers score. I hope someone at Marvel is paying attention enough. She’s proven she can score the upcoming Avengers Kang Dynasty films.
And I had no problem with the choice to have the cats eat everyone so they could board the only capable escape pod. Worth pointing out: none of Kamala’s family were swallowed, and no other civilians – only S.W.O.R.D. personnel. And they knew full well what they were getting into when signed up for Fury’s little space spying enterprise.
@7 and @15: Switching franchises for a moment, this point reminds me of the Vau N’Akat in Star Trek: Prodigy. First contact and exposure to the Federation leads the Vau N’Akat into an apocalyptic civil war, but the Diviner doesn’t blame his own people for warring among themselves; he blames the Federation for encountering them in the first place. In the case of The Marvels, there is a clearer through-line from Captain Marvel’s destruction of the Supreme Intelligence to the Kree civil war than in Prodigy, where the cause and effect are not as clear.
Thanks for all these thoughtful comments. I saw the movie last week and enjoyed it very much, without knowing anything about any of the characters than what I learned from Captain Marvel. But Kamala Khan (and her family) are a revelation; now I’ll have to dig up the Ms Marvel series …
And see The Marvels again.
Any chance of getting one of those kittens?
I think that criticizing Marvel for “not giving [Carol Danvers] a movie since 2019” as if that is somehow not doing justice to her is kind of silly. That’s 4 years. Thor: Ragnarok came 4 years after Dark World and Love and Thunder was 5 years after that. Dr Strange got his second outing 6 years after the first. The Guardians had a 3 and 6 year hiatus. Really the only characters that get a short timeline are Captain America and Iron Man, who are the heart of Phase 1-3 and anyway operated in a MCU that didn’t have nearly as much active IP as exists today.
Went to see this Wednesday afternoon – there were maybe two other people in the audience, but then it was a midweek matinee. I’m right with most of the gallery here; I liked this a great deal, I think it’s easily in the top tier of recent MCU projects, and that one of the primary reasons for that is that it’s as compact a story as it is – for all that it’s very much an action movie chasing itself all over the immediate galaxy (and the next one over), it’s also very much the story of three solo heroines who are learning to trust each other.
Most of my issues are more quibbles than complaints. I agree that the film could have spent just a bit more time clarifying the context of Hala’s near-destruction, but I think that could’ve been done in maybe five more minutes of screen time. I would indeed have liked to see a proper musical sequence on Hala as well. And yes, the unpacking at the Louisiana house is kind of ambiguous; there should have been a line or two somewhere about the Khans’ Jersey City home being properly restored. There should also have been a line in there at least acknowledging that the flerkens are blatantly violating all kinds of laws of conservation of mass in the course of the evacuation – one thought that occurred to me on the way out of the theater is that the flerkens are essentially living equivalents of the Doctor’s TARDIS…which would give Kamala an excuse to write MCU/Who crossover fanfic. (And of course both those universes are about to be officially hosted on Disney+….)
Finally – am I the only one so far to pick up on the fact that Kamala’s last scene in this movie is essentially a replay of Fury’s appearance at the end of Iron Man? I have not yet loaded my disc of that other movie to replay said scene, but at the very least it hits pretty much all the same beats.
All in all, this movie makes me optimistic that there’s still life and energy in the overall MCU, if only its caretakers are willing to harness it properly.
It’s alright.
I thought it was great fun. Now that there are a lot of flerkens on Earth and they can apparently reproduce quickly, that could be interesting
I am dying to see this one, but wary of that thing the MCU does where you have to have seen a previous movie and/or show to get full enjoyment out of it. I’ve seen Captain Marvel 1 and Wanda Vision, but I haven’t seen Ms. Marvel or anythIng else Monica Rambeau might have appeared in. Does that matter very much? *Is* there anything else Monica Rambeau has appeared in?
I can only say that this, when you pop up to the local cinema on a whim, this is exactly the sort of film one hopes to find there – so thank you very much to this article for giving me a very helpful nudge!
One feels that most of the major points I might make have been said before me, but one thing I really loved about this film was the sense of classic “Comics Everybody!” shameless willingness to pull in just about anything to entertain the masses (Also, the visuals of this film were really good).
Also, every single hairball in this movie was a treasure.
EVERY ONE.
#25: Actually, I think your best plan is to see The Marvels first, and then jump into Ms. Marvel. The movie opens with a very quick but effective introduction to Kamala and her family, and part of what we get from Nick Fury’s side of the plot is a look at how her family reacts to being dumped into the middle of an MCU movie (which puts them very much in a position for us, as the audience, to see their side of things; the prayer moment Emmet calls out in the review is totally on point).
It is, in its way, very smart movie-making, though how much of that we should ascribe to conscious forethought and how much to serendipity is hard to say. What we get of Ms. Marvel in The Marvels is a strong sense of who Kamala is – and that’s what we need for the movie itself to draw you in. We don’t need her detailed origin story in the movie, any more than viewers of the 1966 Adam West Batman series needed his origin story to understand Batman. In this context, the Ms. Marvel series tells you where Kamala comes from, both literally and in terms of her character arc…and that origin story is sufficiently complicated that it deserves the serial format.
Viewed in that context, one might reasonably argue that watching the movie first and the series second constitutes a better overall introduction to the character than seeing them the other way around. And from a marketing POV, if the new movie draws a bunch of people to look up the series, that’s all to the good too. (If we’re really lucky, and if some of the online buzz I’ve been seeing is accurate, it may help convince Disney to revive its DVD/Blu-ray program and release the series on disc.)
As to the other question – no, I don’t believe Monica Rambeau has been seen anywhere on screen between WandaVision and The Marvels, save perhaps in one or two brief cameos in the chaos from No Way Home and Multiverse of Madness. And neither of those films is in any way a necessary prerequisite to The Marvels. [ETA: corrected per Christopher’s #28; I had overlooked that since you mentioned having seen WandaVision.]
@27/John C. Bunnell: On the contrary, Monica Rambeau was a major player in WandaVision, which is where she got her superpowers. But I doubt the circumstances of that story are important to following The Marvels.
#28: [thwacks self on forehead] Absolutely correct, and I’ve edited my prior post to so indicate. I’d overlooked WandaVision as a factor since Sarah mentioned having seen that series.
“The dynamic between Danvers, Rambeau, and Khan once they are united make the film an absolute joy to watch all the way down”
Yeah, I co-sign this whole paragraph.
“Memories” was hilarious and I didn’t even connect the Cats part of the gag until we hit the parking lot. I liked the musical planet less because of the so-obviously-prerecorded vocals.
“get to the theater and enjoy”
Please. We saw this opening weekend to vote for the concept with our dollars. Not that I as a devoted comics geek and we as a family unit who bond over the MCU don’t try to get to Marvel stuff early anyhow but my hope was to help mitigate the projected low opening and be part of a movement against the insanely racist, misogynist “don’t get your cooties on my superheroes” crowd.
Kamala Khan is easily one of this century’s best additions to the comics firmament and her MCU incarnation is pure delight. Full stop.
The multiverse is fun but it’s not like everyday life doesn’t go on with all its attendant problems and the end scene teasing an assemblage of younger crimefighters is overdue. I wonder if we haven’t really been shown the Avengers proper because the post-Infinity world is still supposed to be in relative chaos and Thunderbolts is meant to tell the story of hard-edged superhumans being gathered to fill that void; it’s tricky given at once how much and how little of the state of things we’ve seen, though. Just imagine how useful a fully integrated Agents of SHIELD, whether on network or streaming, could have been during this period.
Many thanks to John (27) and Christopher (28)!
@10
I take it you hadn’t read comment #10 yet when you wrote this? :)
I found this to be the definition of a popcorn movie, but felt it was a little too short. I would have liked some expansion on the “we save who we can” and “Annihilator” bits. For me, Brie Larson was the standout. She really gave off an alone-too-long vibe that worked far better than her very restrained performance in the first movie.
#32: Color me puzzled here.
As far as I can tell on glancing back, the only other comment that goes near Kamala’s proto-Fury turn is Joe’s at #2 – and while Joe certainly did see the context of the scene, the point I was trying to express is that (and I still need to go back and look at the Iron Man scene to confirm this) I don’t think it’s just thematically comparable, to my ear it sounded as if Fury’s specific dialogue was fairly closely re-created. Which I submit would make the scene even more amusing that it is on a general level.
Meanwhile, Jeffronicus in #10 is talking about the mid-credits scene (where we catch up with Monica).
[Side note: part of the problem here might be that it is possible for the numbers attached to comment posts to slip in certain cases, specifically when the moderators need to remove a post or posts for one reason or another. That said, while I think I did briefly see one or two spam posts very early in the comment stream, my general impression is that that usually only causes a drift by one or two numbers, and I don’t recall any instance of an eight-post contraction in the years I’ve been hanging out on the site.]
I saw this film was now out on Disney+, and immediately dropped what I was doing to watch it. I hate it that this film has been stigmatized as a flop, because it’s an absolute delight. It’s enormously fun and charming and lively, I feel like I’ve just stepped off a roller coaster (but in a good way, since I hate actual roller coasters), and I hope it gains a new life and popularity now that it’s streaming.
With the short runtime, I’d been worried that Kamala (my favorite of the three) and her family would get short shrift, but to me, this felt like it was a Ms. Marvel movie with Carol and Monica as prominent guest stars. I mean, it was the twin of Kamala’s bangle that drove the whole story, and she was very much the heart of it, bringing the others together and driving a lot of the action and character business with her initiative. And her family got plenty to do, although I’m a little unclear on why Fury brought them up to the space station.
My main disappointment is that I didn’t find Zawe Ashton very impressive as Dar-Benn. I also wish, since she had a sympathetic reason for her actions, that they’d let her agreement to Monica’s plan in the climax be genuine and let her redeem herself.
It was nice to finally get an explanation for the hyperspace system they’ve been using since Guardians of the Galaxy. And it was a nice retcon that flerkens apparently don’t kill the people they eat, but just cough them up again later. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but nothing about them does, and it makes the devouring gimmick more palatable, no pun intended.
I wish we’d gotten more exploration of the quantum bands, their origin and how one of them came to be on Earth.
As for the post-credit scene, I’m startled by how bad the CGI Beast was. They must really have been rushed. Why couldn’t they just put Kelsey Grammer in the makeup again?
Saw the movie on Disney+ with my daughter last week and we loved it. It did feel a bit rushed in places, especially in dealing with Carol and Monica’s relationship. Also, the scene of the fluerkins “eating” people to save them as played for laughs felt a bit weird given the threat to earth in the climax. Still, this is one film I will watch again, and likely buy on Blu-Ray to be sure I always have a copy. *** Unrelated question *** – In the “old” TOR posts comments were numbered, and it seems for at least some people they still are, but I have seen no numbering of comments ever since the website was redone recently. Anyone know why? Thanks.
The only comment numbers I’ve seen have been in old replies ported over from Tor. I guess it’s no longer necessary to refer to a comment by number now that there are nested replies.