Review of The Marvels, directed by Nia DaCosta

Under most normal circumstances, I refuse to see a Marvel movie. There was a long time where I had held out and never seen one, and when I did finally see one, I kind of shrugged and decided it wasn’t that special (I think it was Infinity War, and I only went because a friend of mine begged me to go with her).

So on a normal Sunday night I wouldn’t have decided to go see The Marvels, but when my sister also begged me to go see it with her, as we both have AMC subscriptions and can see movies for basically free at this point, I relented and agreed.

Now, I knew nothing about the female characters the movie was about. I know very little Marvel lore, so I pretty much was coming into this completely blind. Minus the fact I inherently knew Park Seo-joon was in the movie—it’s kind of hard to not know that as someone who has an entire section dedicated to Korean dramas on this blog.

Anyways, I’m rambling. Let’s get into the review!

Three female superheroes get together to save entire worlds from a new threat.

At the beginning of the movie, we are set up pretty quickly with the overarching threat: Dar-Benn, who leads the people of Kree on Hala, is searching for the Quantum Bands of the legends.

She finds one of them, but realizes the other is still out there in the universe. Her entire motivation is to save her people, as we learn later, because Carol Danvers took out the AI that led the Kree empire, which left them on a planet where they can’t breathe or see the sun.

Dar-Benn creates a jump point with her new bands, but it’s near Earth and catches the attention of Nick Fury.

Carol then goes out to investigate, while on the space base, Monica Rambeau, who’s connected to Carol (she calls her her aunt, as Monica’s mother was good friends with Carol before passing), goes out into space and finds a jump point right near the base.

As they touch the jump points at the same time, they switch places along with Kamala Khan, who happens to have the other quantum band while on Earth. The three keep switching off, but the Kree are attacking Carol, so they get sucked into the Khan home with her when she transports.

After this fight, the Monica, Kamala, Kamala’s family, and Nick get together on Earth and deduce that every time one of them uses their powers, they switch places.

It’s decided they should go together, and they first head to the planet of Tarnax. There, the leader of this planet is having talks with Dar-Benn, but when they fail, Dar-Benn opens a massive jump point that destroys the world’s atmosphere, having the potential to kill everyone in there.

They evacuate who they can from the planet, and realize Dar-Benn is stealing components of other planets in order to revive her own.

They head to Aladna next, the water planet, after the women practice fighting. There, they discover Carol married the prince there, and she warns him about the impending attack. Dar-Benn not only succeeds in stealing the water, but she also knocks down Kamala, yet fails to get her band.

She knows now though where it is, and the women corner her elsewhere after trying to steal the Earth’s sun, but she tricks them and steals the band. Then, she opens a wormhole in space, which kills Dar-Benn.

Kamala and Carol use their powers to help Monica close the hole, but Monica goes on the other side in the process, getting sealed in.

Kamala goes home, devastated, Carol goes to Kree to revive their sun, and in the mid-credits scene, Monica wakes up in an alternate universe where this version of her mother is still alive. Kamala also meets Kate Bishop in NYC and decides to create a crime fighting group with her, living out her dreams.

Overall Thoughts

I really like the concept of three capable women saving the universe, but this movie just feels like it’s so shoddily done.

The characters are thrown together in a convenient way and then the rest of the plot just happens like a predictable domino effect—there’s nothing really unique about the story, and I would dare to say this movie isn’t memorable at all even.

I’m sure someone out there likes the movie, and that’s totally fine, but I want women superheroes to have their own incredible story arcs too, not just something that feels like packaged feminism but doesn’t really have any artistry behind it when it comes to the story.

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