Marvel is in trouble. I’m a massive MCU fan, but recently, new projects have failed to grab my attention. “The Marvels” opened on November 10th to middling box office numbers and critic scores. Recently, the MCU’s Disney+ show “Secret Invasion” starring Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury released and was simply awful. Plagued with poor writing, horrible CGI, and weak performances, the MCU is far from the success of “Avengers: Endgame.” While I hear “Loki” season 2 is great, I can’t help feeling apathetic about watching it.
“The Marvels” stars Brie Larson as Captain Marvel, Iman Vellani as Ms. Marvel, and Teyonah Parris as Monic Rambeau. Vellani is definitely the star of this film and one of its few redeeming qualities. She exudes energy and truly captures fangirl energy without going overboard and making her character annoying. Larson and Parris are fine as characters, but the film does little to make their characters enticing to watch.
The visual effects and cinematography of “The Marvels” feels formulaic and rushed. Like the other recent MCU movies, this film is full of bad CGI. One particular scene that takes place on a moon in space that looks downright awful. The characters look as if they are running in slow motion against a stupidly obvious green-screen with awkward choreography. There are a few nice-looking scenes, but they are few and far between. Visually, “The Marvels” looks almost identical to “Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.” That is not a compliment.
To me, a puzzling part about this movie was Nick Fury. If you watched “Secret Invasion,” you know Fury was brooding, depressed, and more serious than he has been as of late. Fury in “The Marvels” feels like a completely different character. He is cracking jokes constantly and does not mention the events of “Secret Invasion” once. Post “Endgame,” Marvel has felt increasingly disjointed with character beats feeling incongruent across films. “The Marvels” exacerbates this issue rather than solves it.
The villain of this film is terrible. The MCU apparently thought that they needed to redo Ronin, the villain from the first “Guardians of the Galaxy.” You probably don’t remember who that is and for good reason: he sucked and was the worst part of that movie. The villain of “The Marvels” has a somewhat unique motivation for her actions, but the film did not fully realize the potential of that motivation.
There is a particular sequence in the film that I thought was extremely cheesy. The cast arrives on a planet where the only way to communicate is via song. Then, Captain Marvel begins to dance with the prince of this planet while singing. The song was bad, and the scene did not fit with the movie or the larger MCU as a whole. It seemed to be there to allow Disney to sell Captain Marvel as a Disney Princess, rather than serving the story.
The MCU needs to change courses quickly. Audience trust is at a franchise low, and it is now hurting both viewership and box office. The MCU needs to refocus and build toward a cohesive universe, rather than a collection of disjointed stories. It is baffling to me that we do not know the roster of the core Avengers team and we are 4 years from “Avengers: Endgame.” For me, the MCU is beginning to lose its spark and it needs to change.