The Marvels - Silly Silly
Thoughts On: The Marvels (2023)
Captain Marvel confronts an angry politician wielding a magic hammer and portal bracelet.
Not very interesting at all. Entertaining in parts, but suffering the same symptoms as most other Marvel movies. In short, as much as this lacks symbolic integrity it also lacks basic narrative sense. This is quite a stupid film with little to no point. The plot moves incredibly fast in quite a clear attempt to mask very significant lapses in logic and to hide enormous amounts of missing story and character development. If singing, flashing lights and kittens is enough to distract you from that, I'm sure you'd find The Marvels entertaining enough. But, I simply could not wrap my head around how the villain is so powerful that she can confidently face off against what was presented in previous Marvel films to be the most overpowered superhero of all - one capable of recharging a sun - yet is ultimately taken down by a sharp piece of falling ship debris. It's just silly - in an almost insulting way. More significantly, what is really achieved from a narrative stand-point; nothing substantial is said or emotionally transmitted and the drama takes us almost nowhere different in the Marvel universe. There's no tension between characters - everyone and everything just gets along amicably - Captain Marvel and co just briefly hug when a pivotal character is seemingly lost forever, and despite being deemed an annihilator, a destroyer of worlds, Captain Marvel just shrugs off her mistakes and blinds herself to them before finally being instructed on how to sort the obviously solved problems she creates. The f*ck? There's not too much else to say about this; it felt like a prolonged day-in-the-life montage of a space hero with no real arc or narrative development beyond the moving around of more mystic quantum gadgets. Like a music video without a good soundtrack, The Marvels can be watched but barely paid attention to, and certainly isn't worth re-watching. People really are irresponsible with money.
