November 8, 2023
Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) was a Kree revolutionary warrior who was leading her people's fight to build back their old homeland which had been destroyed by a powerful entity called the Annihilator. Her main weapon was a powerful mallet-like cosmo-rod. In one of her expeditions, she found an ancient bangle which allowed her to generate power enough to create and manipulate jump points into different areas of time and space.
At one moment in time, Captain Marvel Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) was on a remote planet, investigating a cosmic disturbance. Monica Rambeau (Teyonnah Parris) was working in a space station run by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) was in their Jersey City home, working on her Capt. Marvel fan scrapbook. When they all used their respective powers at the same time, they all switched positions.
When the trailers came out for this new Marvel film earlier this year, the chemistry among the three leads felt quite lame, so my expectations about this were pretty low. However, now that I have finally seen the whole film on IMAX, I have to say that I was proven wrong. "The Marvels" turned out to be very funny and entertaining, overall. This would be true for fans who had been following the MCU miniseries released on Disney+ recently.
This new film incorporated together very well various threads Marvel had been laying down in their different MCU Disney+ series. While the film does give capsulized recaps of the origin stories of Monica and Kamala, I feel that those who have never seen "WandaVision" (2021) or "Ms. Marvel" (2022) before may not really fully appreciate these new characters and their superpowers as much as those who have.
We first knew Monica Rambeau as a little girl in the first "Captain Marvel" (2019), the daughter of Carol's best friend Maria. We then met the adult Monica as a S.W.O.R.D. agent working for Nick Fury in "WandaVision". This was also where we saw her gained her superpowers to manipulate the whole spectra of the electromagnetic spectrum when she passed through a magical hex field. We get to see more range of her powers here.
We first knew about lovable teenager Kamala Khan and her wacky family -- mother Muneeba (Zenobia Shroff), father Yusuf (Mohan Kapur) and older brother Aamir (Saagar Shaikh) from "Ms. Marvel". This series showed us the origins of Ms. Marvel when an inherited bangle woke up Kamala's dormant mutant gene that enabled her to solidify light. It also showed slices of life in a Pakistani-American family and community.
Carol Danvers was still pretty much the stoic, serious superhero we met in the "Avengers" and her first feature film. Brie Larson gets to explore more aspects of Carol here, but unfortunately, she still felt like the weakest link in the lead triumvirate. I felt that Teyonnah Parris (so strong and commanding) and Iman Vellani (so cheerful and ) actually upstaged the generally dry and awkward Larson, who can't seem to get Carol's personality right.
The entanglement situation of their three light-related superpowers made for very frenetic fight scenes, be they located in different dimensions, or in the same place. The two most memorable scenes were the musical welcome by the singing people of planet Aladna and their dashing prince Yan (Park Seo-joon), and the topsy-turvy evacuation scene involving a horde of cats set to the maudlin ballad "Memory" (from the musical "Cats", get it?)
This film had a number of guest cameos of other MCU superhero characters for the fans. Midway in the film, Carol would call on a surprise someone to help ferry the Skrulls to safety. At the final scene of the film, another character from a Disney+ miniseries appeared to tease a future team collaboration. Then there's that unexpected guest in the awesome mid-credits scene that elicited a collective gasp and spontaneous cheers. 7/10
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