The Marvels - MCU

Ahem

Back on the topic of the film this thread is about, I watched it last night. As with Captain Marvel before it, I enjoyed it (despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth from fans that means you now functionally have to disregard any first weekend reviews if you want a Normal Human Being review of an MCU film).

Specific things I liked:

• The runtime being under 2 hours, and paced accordingly. Marvel has had a bad habit of padding runtime, so it was a nice change to see that not in effect here.
• The panache of the opening scene - someone clearly likes the Spiderverse films (and possibly the Mitchells vs The Machines too), and I'm very much in favour of it.
• The choreography on the fight scenes was well-put-together so that, even when there was a bunch of body-swapping going on everything was still easy to follow.
• Kamala Khan is a great character. I haven't seen Ms Marvel yet, but will now be catching up on it. For me, the character lands in the way I think Tom Holland's Spider-man lands for others (but it's been decades since Peter Parker's Spider-man could get anything beyond a shrug from me).
• The Second Planet they go was great (not saying more because it deserves to be seen blind). It's the sort of thing that would be best served by leaving it be and not trying to weave it into the Wider Lore, but the MCU doesn't have much room for that doing thst
• The plot was fairly simple, as was the villain, but I appreciated that it still had clear and personal stakes - and specifically the notion that maybe just punching villains isn't actually the way to solve problems or help people... And to be fair, MCU villains are weak whenever it's a day that ends in y 😁

For context, when I say I enjoyed this - I had already started to lose interest in the MCU overall before Infinity War/Endgame, because I CBA with the whole "watch all of the things to get the 'full' story". So at this point what I hope for out of an MCU film is what you might call a 6.5-7/10 kind of film, with at least a bit of personality and actual humour (as opposed to the "everyone sounds the same" quippy crap that too often is used as a placeholder for humour).

I do wish that some of the visual flair from Dacosta's Candyman could have been displayed here, but that's the ongoing issue with the Visual Beigeness of MCU films, where if you're lucky you get a few cool scenes or moments but that's about it.

I can't help but find it strange that this is the film where audiences may have finally lost patience with Marvel when, to my (admittedly Filthy Casual) eyes there's been tedium and bloat in increasing quantities for years, and this is actually a welcome example of paring things back. But I guess some of it isn't about the film but just however many films/series before it people have felt burned by...

Horses for courses I guess. while his power-set offers interesting possibilities, I find Strange as a character pretty dull. Ant-man is even worse, in that I know I watched the first film but can't remember a thing about it. (Oh, if only we'd gotten the Edgar Wright version...) I thought Thor in Ragnarok was interesting, but there seemed to be a real "what do we do with this guy now?" feel to Love & Thunder.

I agree that Carol Danvers as a character hasn't exactly got a lot of depth (definitely has that feel of a Superman-type character), but I assume that's why Monica and Kamala are also joint protagonists in this one.

Yeah, I agree that Captain Marvel / Danvers as currently positioned is more of a plot device than a character. I liked the idea of what this film was going for with Monica and Kamala both providing different perspectivs on Carol/Captain Marvel that challenge her ideas of herself, but that's the kind of arc that would genuinely be better suited to a series than a film. (It also depends on how much you enjoy watching those other characters - I thought Kamala was great while Rambeau was just ok, but if you didn't warm to either of them then there's not really much else to latch on to...)

Similarly the somewhat simple gimmick of Carol's power simply amplifying the villain's power (i.e. you can't just punch your way out of this one, so what else can you think of?) was a nice way of introducing a challenge for Carol.

But those are both "fine for one film" things, and don't help to resolve the question of what you can do with Danvers as an ongoing character in a shared universe. Based on where this film ends the most honest trajectory for the character I can see would be a sort of Doctor Manhattan arc, of losing her connection to humanity and just going off to do something else instead. But that's a bit... leftfield for what the MCU tends towards doing.