I Just Saw

I saw The Marvels and it was pretty bland. You know it’s bland when one of the recurring themes of positive criticism around it is that it’s blessedly short for a superhero film. It’s a remarkably clunky piece of storytelling, lurching from one set piece to the next with no real ebb and flow. In that sense, it feels oddly like a middling extended episode of a television show, with no real stakes or tension or even acts, just action scenes punctuated by an occasional stab at humour or detour into camp.

I’ve heard it said that The Marvels is at least better than recent Marvel efforts like Thor: Love and Thunder and Ant-Man: Quantamania, but I saw both those movies and liked them better than this one, Love and Thunder in particular for its deliberately cheesy and comedic tone. Maybe that shows how divergent my taste is from that of the people who take these films seriously. I don’t know, though. Love and Thunder had ten times the personality of The Marvels in its prologue alone, and Quantamania at least had one or two somewhat interesting visual ideas, like the black void filled with an inverted whirlpool of endlessly replicating Ant-Men.

Which isn’t to say that I hated The Marvels. It was just… what it was. None of the characters was interesting, the villain, in particular, was utterly useless, a lot of scenes looked incredibly cheap on a TV level (some of it was giving me flashbacks to ’90s Star Trek), and the story was a vaguely assembled nonsense of space opera babble and indifferent continuity. (In one scene, an entire suburban house is all but destroyed in a fight with teleporting aliens, and apparently none of the neighbours or anyone, anywhere noticed or was even around. Ditto when a spacecraft crashes on the New York waterfront. For a city that never sleeps, the streets of the Big Apple sure are deserted.)

But it wasn’t actively unpleasant, and its relatively brief running time (an hour and forty-five minutes) is a virtue. It’s probably best watched on streaming unless you’re a Marvel superfan. The “plot” is that a magical alien tyrant called Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) is seeking two sci-fi bangles that when banged together will help to restore her planet’s atmosphere, and in the meantime, she wants revenge against Captain Marvel (Brie Larsen) for inadvertently dooming her planet while trying to restore peace. Due to INSERT EXPOSITION HERE, both Marvel and colleague Captain Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) keep switching places in the space-time continuum with Ms Marvel (Iman Vellani) a teenage mutant who teams up with them to fight Dar-Benn.

Samuel L Jackson is far and away the most charismatic performer, returning as Nick Fury. Easily the best scenes, though, involve the alien cats that store people in their digestive systems before ejecting them unharmed via tentacles that come out of their faces. Nothing about them makes sense and would seem especially absurd in a Douglas Adams-type comic fantasy, let alone this film, but I liked that about them. They provided some much-needed absurdist invention and levity in an otherwise very dry experience.

Rating: 1.5/4