The Marvels: MCU Hits Rock-Bottom With This Glorified Instagram Reel

THERE was a time when Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movies were superhero stories with a dash of self-parody. Then they started becoming self-parodies with a dash of superhero dust. With The Marvels, though, we are in uncharted territory: It’s all parody. The pretense is over. What superheroes? This is now squarely in Youtube Content Central, where all those cool comic-book characters we’ve grown up imagining are nothing more than the punchlines of 33 MCU jokes. Fan-service is such a massive priority that fans are literally in this trillion-dollar franchise (no, really, who do you think Ms. Marvel is?) in a cloyingly cutesy Gen-Z reading of parasocial love.

They’ve taken the Marvel Humour Syndrome — that unique sickness where, if a film dares to run for more than 11.5 seconds without a quip or visual gag or spoofy needle-drop, Disney will take Lionel Messi hostage on the moon — so far that a huge “rescue mission” in The Marvels features hundreds of cats on a spaceship swallowing all the humans and storing them in their tummies so that they can be transported safely to another planet. Holy Alice in Wonderland, what is even happening anymore? At another point, the protagonists reach a planet whose people communicate only through song (cue K-drama star cameo).

I get that Christopher Nolan is technically to blame for humanising the comic-book superhero so effectively that Marvel decided to do the opposite and turn the whole thing into a tension-diffusing circus. But these are the sort of moments that belong to The Naked Gun or Scary Movie, not the source material like Top Gun or Scream. How does one take the universe-saving quests of the Avengers and all their associates seriously when everyone seems to be mocking the scale of their own adventures? How can we look at Brie Larson randomly switching between haunted/workaholic superhero and reluctant teen idol? The balance is not off, it’s OFF.

Anyway. The Marvels. The 7892nd MCU movie to use wormholes and random sci-fi jargon like “rupture in space-time fabric” and “Quantum entanglement” and “jump point anomaly” to expand its plot sideways. Also, what plot? The gimmick is centered on a teleportation glitch that keeps switching the places of Carol Danvers (otherwise known as Captain Marvel), Monica Rambeau (daughter of Carol’s late friend Maria) and Jersey teen Kamala Khan (better known as Ms. Marvel). As a result, in a barely coherent ‘comedy’ action sequence, they end up fighting each other’s enemies — which, in the case of Kamala Khan, is the sudden presence of Captain Marvel and Rambeau in her family’s living room. Iman Vellani is genuinely funny and wide-eyed as the annoying Captain Marvel fanatic who’s living out her dream (and nightmare), but we’ve already seen this sort of mentor-protege madness between wise Iron Man and young Spidey. Even the generational humour between the three doesn’t quite reach its Instagram-reel-ish peak. There are spurts of life, but that’s about it for a film that is basically one girl-power gag parading as a super-saver premise.

The rest of the plot — which features Kree Supremor (look at me writing down these terms like I’m a geek) Darr-Benn plundering the atmosphere and water from other planets to resuscitate her own — is a pointless blur. The film itself treats these dramatic parts of the narrative in the way Hindi action films treat romantic tracks — as dispensable visual devices. It just bides time until the next Miss-Marvel-being-scolded-by-her-Pakistani-mother or Captain-Marvel-rolling-her-eyes moment. Darr-Benn could be tap-dancing on the sun and it’d make no difference to the kids who’ve come to see the rat-a-tat teamwork between a fangirl and her hero, a white saviour and her god-daughter. There’s also Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury who looks every bit like a Hollywood star who’s bought a new lake with the blood money from this cinema-killing franchise. They got the fan and the cats in, next they’ll get Martin Scorsese playing himself or us playing ourselves in a Marvel-themed Black Mirror episode. Where does the superhero end and the parody begin? Who cares anymore?

The good news is that only one MCU movie is slated to release in 2024. The bad news is that it’s Deadpool 3 — a franchise symbolic of the Ryan-Reynolds-ification of the entire modern superhero landscape. At this rate, when aliens do actually invade in the future and a few celestial beings from Mars fly down to rescue us, a generation of Marvel and DC watchers will greet them with selfies and free tickets to their meta stand-up gigs. Nobody will be awed or frightened by them, thanks to the systemic desensitisation of imagination, dreams and wonder by a factory that’s up to its neck in creative corruption. The Marvels represents the absolute worst of this movie capitalism, and even though I’m not one to have strong opinions about one film-maker bitching out another, I stand with Scosese’s purist snobbery. At least he has something to show for it. What does Marvel have, except the dumbed-down pop-cultural tsunami that it’s triggered? The next time Comic Con comes to town, I’m going to be there dressed as Robert de Niro from Killers of the Flower Moon. It’ll be peaceful until an Avengers fan asks me if that’s the name of the new Transformers movie.