The Marvels (2023)

Three heroes, one messy villain, and a post-credit scene that landed like a balloon losing air.

🎬 Let’s start by showing y’all the trailers shall we?

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🧭 Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

This movie follows Carol Danvers, Monica Rambeau, and Kamala Khan after their powers start getting weirdly entangled with each other. Every time one of them uses their abilities, they suddenly swap places with one another.

So if Kamala throws a punch in New Jersey, she might suddenly end up in space while Carol gets teleported into Kamala’s bedroom.

Which… actually leads to some pretty funny moments.

The three eventually realize their powers are linked through some cosmic anomaly connected to jump points across space.

Meanwhile a Kree revolutionary named Dar-Benn is trying to restore her dying homeworld by tearing open jump points and stealing resources from other planets.

So now the three heroes have to learn how to work together while constantly teleporting around mid-fight.

The movie is pretty short for an MCU film and honestly moves very fast. It’s basically hopping between planets while the trio figures out how to stop the villain and how to actually function as a team.

It’s not bad.

But it’s also not exactly memorable either.


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👥 Character Rundown

Carol Danvers / Captain Marvel (Brie Larson)
Carol actually feels more relaxed here than she did in her first movie. She has more personality and the movie tries to explore the consequences of some of the choices she made in the past.

Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris)
Monica brings the emotional tension. She’s still dealing with the fact that Carol basically disappeared for decades after promising she’d always be around for her and her mother.

Kamala Khan / Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani)
Kamala absolutely steals this movie. She’s basically the audience’s voice the entire time because she’s a huge Captain Marvel fan and cannot believe she’s suddenly working alongside her hero.

Her energy is honestly what keeps the movie alive.

Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson)
Nick Fury is mostly comedic here. He’s running things from a space station and spends a lot of time dealing with chaos, alien cats, and confused astronauts.

Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton)
And unfortunately… the villain is easily the weakest part of the film.

She barely gets any development and feels more like a plot device than an actual character.


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⏱️ Pacing / Episode Flow

The pacing is weird.

On one hand the movie moves extremely fast. It jumps from planet to planet with barely any downtime.

But on the other hand that speed actually helps the movie because it never really drags.

It’s one of the few Marvel movies recently that doesn’t feel bloated.

It’s just very thin story-wise.


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✅ Pros

The trio dynamic works.
Watching Carol, Monica, and Kamala bounce off each other is easily the best part of the movie.

Kamala Khan is fantastic.
Iman Vellani brings a ton of charm and enthusiasm that the movie really needs.

The power-swapping gimmick is fun.
Fight scenes where the characters suddenly switch places mid-action are actually pretty creative.

The runtime is short.
The movie gets in, tells its story, and gets out.


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❌ Cons

The villain is terrible.
Dar-Benn might be one of the most forgettable MCU villains ever.

The story is extremely thin.
There isn’t much depth beyond “villain stealing resources.”

Some of the tone is very goofy.
There’s an entire musical planet sequence that feels like it wandered in from a completely different movie.

The post-credit scene reaction was… sad.


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💭 Final Thoughts

This movie is basically the definition of not bad but not great either.

It’s fun enough while you’re watching it.

The trio works well together, Kamala brings great energy, and the movie moves quickly.

But the villain is weak, the plot is thin, and nothing here really feels important in the larger MCU story.

And the moment Marvel clearly expected to be the big crowd-pleasing reveal ended up landing with a pretty awkward silence in my theater.


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⭐ Rating

6/10

Fun enough, but nothing amazing.


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⚠️ Spoiler Warning

Alright now we’re getting into full spoilers.


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🚨 Spoilers

So the villain Dar-Benn is a Kree revolutionary who blames Carol Danvers for the collapse of the Kree empire.

Apparently Carol destroyed the Supreme Intelligence years earlier which led to civil war on the Kree homeworld of Hala. The planet ended up dying, losing its atmosphere and resources.

So Dar-Benn decides the solution is to basically rob other planets.

She uses a powerful bangle that allows her to tear open jump points across space.

Her plan is simple:

Steal water from one planet.

Steal atmosphere from another.

Steal a sun from somewhere else.

And use all of that to restore Hala.

The heroes track her across multiple worlds trying to stop her.

One of those worlds is an extremely bizarre musical planet where everyone communicates through singing.

Yes.

The characters literally have to sing.

Carol even ends up in a full musical number which is probably the weirdest moment in the movie.

Then there’s the Flerken chaos scene.

Nick Fury realizes the only way to evacuate the space station is to let the alien cat creatures swallow all the astronauts and escape pods.

So the entire crew basically gets eaten by space cats while “Memory” from Cats plays in the background.

Which is… definitely a creative choice.

Eventually Dar-Benn attempts to open a massive jump point to steal Earth’s sun.

But the energy overload starts tearing reality apart and creates a massive dimensional rift.

The heroes stop Dar-Benn, but the tear in space keeps growing.

So Monica sacrifices herself by flying into the rift and sealing it from the other side.

She ends up trapped in another universe.

Now this leads to the post-credit scene.

Monica wakes up in a hospital room.

She sees her mother Maria Rambeau standing next to her.

Except this version of Maria is not her mother.

She’s Binary, a variant from another universe.

Then someone enters the room.

And it’s Beast from the X-Men, played by Kelsey Grammer from the Fox X-Men movies.

Marvel clearly expected this moment to get a huge reaction.

Except when I saw it in theaters…

No one applauded.

No cheers.

No gasps.

It was just quiet. It felt like everyone in the thratre just died, which honestly we all did inside.

Like the theater didn’t really know how to react.

Which honestly made the moment feel kind of sad.

Marvel clearly wanted this to be a big exciting reveal tying the X-Men into the MCU multiverse.

But instead the room just kind of sat there in silence before everyone got up and walked out.

And that pretty much sums up the reaction to the movie itself.

Not terrible.

Just… not very exciting either.