Captain Marvel (2019) brought us a female superhero who was just as strong as the boys, able among other things to almost uniquely lift and wield Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir. It was a commercially successful tale of Air Force pilot Carol Danvers (Brie Larsen), who when exposed to an exploding faster-than-light engine, absorbs the energy and undergoes mutagenic transformation. Instead of burning up or dying the way we normal people do when falling victim to gamma radiation or radioactive spider bites.
Four years later in our time, but more like 20 years later in the cinematic chronology, Captain Marvel is back for a new adventure, but as part of a female superhero trio, including one Pakistani Muslim teen (Iman Vellani) and an African-American astrophysicist (Teyonah Parris), fighting yet another female, an alien from a species that is conveniently also two-gendered, male and female, and like almost everyone in this movie except blond Scandanavian-American Brie Larsen, a person of color. Though since she is playing a leader of the alien Kree empire, one of the colors is blue.
The Marvels is also written by a female trio - Nia DaCosta, Megan McDonnell, Elissa Karasik - and directed by a woman, Nia DaCosta. After one weekend, it isn’t doing well. It cost $250 million to make, but it made less than $50 million its opening weekend, and after a week has only made a little over $100 million.
I saw it; I liked it. But I don’t know that I disagree with the audiences, who seem to be giving it a B, not an A or an A-. The trade press - organs like Deadline Hollywood or The Wrap - are now discussing what went wrong as if they were Republicans the day after an election.
One would think Nia Dacosta could handle a syfy film, since she is a protege of Jordan Peele, who has had a number of successes in syfy. Instead, much as Billy Eichner blamed straight people for his flop Bros, DaCosta blamed men and white people for the failure of her saga of space sistahs.
Critics are focusing on a variety of issues, including that The Marvels can’t pick a genre, deciding whether to be an action film or a silly comedy. It is indeed full of comic scenes, as when the three heroines - whose powers have become entangled, so that when one uses her powers she then switches places with one of the others - practice jumping rope and juggling to improve their collective coordination. But the campy comedy Thor: Ragnorak was one of the top 10 highest grossing films of 2017 ($850 million) so that excuse, like two of the heroines, doesn’t really fly. Others oddly blame an overworked white savior - Marvel maestro Kevin Fiege was too busy with too many projects to check DaCosta’s work.
One difference between this all lady effort and traditional syfy seems to be a sloppiness with the actual science. “Boy” science fiction likes nerdy elaborations of how star ships and such actually work, brilliantly spoofed in the syfy comedy Galaxy Quest (1999), where comicon fans are called in to explain how a space ship aliens have built after watching a cult tv show functions and can be navigated. This love of cannon, detail, and science results in books like The Physics Behind Star Wars, The Science of Star Trek, and The Klingon Dictionary.
Director Nia DaCosta and her writers have no such nerdy concerns. Our three heroines - Carol Danvers, Monica Rambeau, and Kamala Khan - have their powers entangled because they all have “light-based powers” and two of them were touching unstable wormholes in space simultaneously. And apparently, they were the only people in the universe doing these things at the time. The fact that Ms. Rambeau is the adopted niece of Carol Danvers and Kamala Khan has a fan crush on Captain Marvel is just a coincidence. Sorority replaces science.
In the earlier Captain Marvel, the Monica Rambeau character was just a child, a pre-teen that loved her “aunt” Carol Danvers and did not want her to leave on (what turned out to be a 20 yearlong) adventure in space. I had not noticed, but this character had reappeared as an adult in the Marvel universe, as a federal agent in the excellent Disney+ series Wandavision (2021). To understand what is going on in The Marvels, a character has to explain that Monica Rambeau acquired superpowers as a kind of contagion in her interaction with the witch, Wanda. (Superpowers she has not learned how to use, leading Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) to shout at her when she attempts to fly “Where’s that black girl magic?”). And of course, to understand who Kamala Khan is, you’d need to have watched the Disney+ miniseries Ms. Marvel.
So, to actually fully understand and enjoy this egalitarian film, which has only one white actress (Brie Larsen) and one white actor (Gary Lewis, buried under green prosthetics as he plays an alien emperor) the audience needs to have a Disney+ subscription. Perhaps this lowered audience ratings.
Another oddity of the movie is Monica Rambeau’s (Teyonah Parris’s) gigantic posterior. It’s a big butt for an ordinary person. For an actress it’s just huge. All of that of course is fine. Fat assed people lead happy and worthwhile lives, and many are even great performers beloved by audiences.
But their derrieres are not encased in spandex and pleather superhero outfits and then thrust into our faces.
Perhaps the all-lady team producing the movie thought it would be body shaming to figure out how not to put all three superheroes into Lycra outfits. Perhaps they just didn’t realize that they have essentially created the Avenger’s/Marvel equivalent of People of Wal-Mart.
An additional oddity is the alien creature known as “Goose.” Goose appeared in Captain Marvel, where he seems to humans to be a simple tabby cat. Aliens - Kree and Skrull - all recognized him as something else, a “Flerken,” an animal that looks like a small cat on the outside but contains a large octopus-like creature on the inside. When threatened, giant tentacles come out of its mouth, and they entangle and swallow the bad guys. A pussycat that is a devouring octopus is a pretty obvious metaphor for fear of the vagina, so one assumes that it’s part of the humor of the movie and not unconscious. In The Marvels, Goose reproduces, and an army of kittens are yet another deus ex machina that moves along the plot. It’s an entertaining scene, set to music from the Broadway show Cats, and a little reminiscent of the classic “The Trouble with Tribbles.”
(One might think The Marvels is going after the growing “incel” market - the 60% of college freshmen who are still virgins - with its scary vagina metaphors and absence of any romance. Though it does have just a teeny touch of romance - in her 20 years off planet Carol Danvers seems to have married one alien prince in what is briefly described as more a political arrangement than one of sex or love, and in another scene with a cameo by Valkyrie Tessa Thompson there is a suggestion that she and Danvers may have been more than just friends.)
So, yet another attempt at “intersectional” science fiction that banishes the white man, or at least makes women of color central. Some of these have been successful. Disney+’s female Jedi of color Ahsoka worked, but then it starred Rosario Dawson. Star Trek: Discovery also worked, unevenly, and is allegedly returning for a fifth season, but it starred Michelle Yeoh. So perhaps what The Marvels needed was just more star power.
Director: Nia DaCosta
Release date: November 9, 2023
Distributor: Disney/Marvel
Screenwriters: Nia DaCosta, Megan McDonnell, Elissa Karasik
Cast: Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris, Iman Vellani, Samuel L. Jackson, Zawe Ashton, Saagar Shaikh, Zenobia Shroff, Mohan Kapur
A slightly shorter version of this review ran last week at SpliceToday.
Young guys seemingly like big explosive action movies. Their girlfriends go along because they like Thor’s shoulders. They like ripped men in tight clothing acting very male. Take out Thor’s shoulders etc and you lose a big chunk of your audience. The girlfriends. Most Latinos are more traditional gender wise than Lib whites. Gender bend and you will lose some of them. And while guys like hot babes in movies they really can’t get past the disbelief of a woman easily tossing around six guys who want to fight her. Movies require a suspension of disbelief. So they lose a large part of the straight male audience. This trans thing is not bought into by 80% of the population. And to those who do buy into it few really do. It is theatre and virtue signaling. Hollywood seems to think their current thing, while trending, means everyone is in agreement.
South Park nailed it. Their "Through The Panderverse" episode trailer ends with a producer [when questioned] saying, "The problem is YOU!"
The article you link to is literally just that! What a joke. She said this:
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/11/15/the-marvels-director-freaks-on-racist-sexist-homophobic-haters-but-the-flops-largest-group-of-ticket-buyers-is-male-and-white/
*** “There are pockets where you go because you’re like, ‘I’m a super fan. I want to exist in the space of just adoration — which includes civilized critique,” she said. “Then there are pockets that are really virulent and violent and racist — and sexist and homophobic and all those awful things. And I choose the side of the light. That’s the part of fandom I’m most attracted to.” ***
When someone makes a movie and ignores what matters, people won't go watch it. It's really pretty simple.
You would think after the "all-female" Ghostbusters they would have figured it out.
However, when you consider that none of these Panderverse movies are actually designed to "entertain," it makes more sense. This current crop of movies are like sad period pieces. Only they are trying to mimic a period that nobody is happy with.
It's like making a Sci-Fi film about how the US gets a fake installed president, and the economy goes to shit. People go to the movies to be entertained, not to be reminded about everything they dislike -- right now!