Movie Review: "The Marvels" (2023)

I saw this film on the 15th of November, 2023.

Now, as we all know, the Marvel Universe has been going down the hill for quite some time. After the events of Avengers: Endgame and the grief the world felt for the character of Tony Stark, the universe seems to be coming apart at the seems so badly that even the Loki TV show cannot save it over on Disney+. From this, I think we are seeing these Marvel movies simply become your run-of-the-mill action film and are driving down to being nothing special. What better what to usher that in than a fun but underwhelming movie like The Marvels?

About three superheroes, two of which I had personally never actually heard of before and one I don't particularly like - this film serves as one of the more child-like movies in the universe. An underdeveloped storyline which would only make sense if you knew the boring story of Captain Marvel, this film deals with an entanglement of powers that seems to be stolen right out of DC and its Superman story. This film takes place mostly in space and does not have the correct amount of time to flesh anything out. A blink-and-you'll-miss-it film, this was really short and felt a bit underwhelming more than once.

I will say though, the advantage of this movie is that it was funny. However, the audience that it was aimed at (being small children) would not have understood references to films like Dead Poet's Society, which I can even doubt the actress saying the line picked up on since that movie was released probably long before she was born. A badly written script that though it was funny fails to play to its target audience at times and messes around with irrelevent humour whilst trying to latch together three characters with astonishingly different personalities. Now you are going to say 'but Iron Man and Captain America were so different...' yes, but Iron Man was able with charisma to lock in the audience and Captain America was at least a good sidekick for that. The problem this The Marvels has is that it is trying to make a movie out of three characters the audience does not care about.

The main issue here is that Captain Marvel has only had one film to herself and is already in a group movie. The child Marvel character, (who has only had a TV show on Disney+ which had an average of about 4.2 million in ratings) is a character who basically has no storyline that anyone seems to care about shown by such low ratings and negative reviews. I spent a very long time trying to figure out who the final character was and when I did, it was severely underwhelming. This is in comparison to former characters who at least had one or two good movies under their belt before doing a movie as a group of characters - yes I am talking about Avengers: Assemble. The movies were highly rated before the group movie came along and that was the right way to do it.

The scenes themselves were pretty shoddy. For example: if I have to watch Brie Larson dance again, I will walk out of the movie. The song and dance scene was long, drawn out, boring and required to be cut out of the movie as it disturbed the flow. I thought these women were supposed to be getting ready for war, why do they all of a sudden have time for singing and dancing? This needed to be thought about as it adds nothing to the storyline and draws out the scene into something that none of the audience members care about.

All in all, though it was fun, it had some major problems which means I will not be able to rate it very highly at all. It is filled with weird plot holes and strange nonsensical scenes where you can see that Marvel is trying their best to appeal to younger children but they fail upon one key factor of today's youth: today's youth do not care about superhero movies anymore. And so, we wait for another Marvel show or movie to come out, I am sure it cannot be much worse than this.