The Marvels has to be in my top three favorite MCU movies of all time, up there with Endgame and the Spider-Verse. It is a film brimming with weird, chaotic gremlin energy, surrealist humor, and a high-wire act of mashing multiple franchises for the most creative team movie since the first Avengers ten years ago.
I don’t get to write about television much, just as a self-imposed rule. From time to time we talk about Bridgerton (actually, it sounds like we talk about Bridgerton a LOT a lot by the looks of these links) or Locke and Key and the intersection between the Star Wars Expanded Universe and the movies, but generally it takes me so much time to finish a television series and by the time it happens everyone has already moved on and the time in my life when I’m going to live-Tweet a finale is long past, although I do still love a good live-Tweet for other people. For instance, I’m in the midst of finishing three different series right now: Locke and Key, Atlanta Season 4, and the endless and endlessly entertaining Fantasy High series on Dropout. I have been on the verge of finishing all of these shows for about a year, with no end in sight. Would you enjoy periodic updates on individual episodes? Probably not! So now you see why this is movies and only movies.
Anyway, until very recently I have been a fairly loyal devotee to the Phase Four shows, mostly because of state- and self-imposed isolation during 2021, but also because they’re so freaking good. With minor exceptions, I think every television show has topped the last:
- WandaVision: The big draw besides the novelty of seeing movie stars make the jump to the small screen was the fact that each episode’s gimmick was going to be the movement from one decade of television genre to the next. For that alone this was an ambitious and visually appealing mystery box of a show that set up for some exciting things for Wanda before she was done so dirty in the Dr Strange follow up, but maybe not forever? This is also where we were first introduced, of course, to Monica Rambeau AKA Photon AKA Prof Marvel AKA Light Vision.
- The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: I held off on watching this until much later but fell in love with it almost immediately. I had heard other people describe it as a pretty good action/spy show and it is, but it’s also one of the coolest critiques of systemic racism in Disney canon and there’s more than one WTF did someone just get to say that about Captain America moment in this show. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see how this show was created for a more conservative audience of Marvel viewers, even despite the fact that there are some truly radical ideas about race relations and the broken promises the country made to black folks embedded in this series.
- Loki: Set a high bar for weird and wonderful by introducing the concept of variants and fully realizing in live action the dreams of so many fan fic writers over the years with Sylvie and the ascension of gender bending narratives. The exquisite sadness of Owen Wilson, the brilliant casting of Rosie from Lovecraft Country so that she and Tic (AKA Kang AKA Jonathan Majors) could be reunited once again, the continued wonder of bringing back the not-quite-Avenger-Avenger even after his own high profile death in order to kick the multiverse into overdrive, and also give me an excuse to, once again, share this photo with the world of Loki temporarily dating Taylor Swift and going on an Italian vacation in which he had pre-made a I HEART TAYLOR shirt.
- What If…?: Did some of the coolest possible speculative fiction work and even brought Black Panther back from the dead in order to voice his character. The voice work is amazing because it’s done by the actual cast from the live action movies and there’s all sorts of tie-ins to the movies, things that reward you for watching, like Captain America’s appearance, if only briefly, in Multiverse of Madness. I think I only ever saw the first four episodes, but not for lack of love did I stop. It’s the same reason I never finish a series I adore. I just can’t imagine it being over. Excited to browse through next year’s season!
- Hawkeye: Marks the highwater point for Hailey Steinfeld, who also voiced Vi in Arcane AND Spider Gwen (!!!) last year. The series included the venerable Florence Pugh being even more unhinged and adorable than she was when playing second/third fiddle to Rachel Weisz, David Harbor, and Scarlet Johansson. Steinfeld is a best friend of Taylor Swift, the star of one of my favorite movies of all time, The Edge of Seventeen, and I remember thinking the entire time that I watched this show that all I want out of Marvel is spin offs of Hawkeye. I love how many think pieces came out about the way in which this show admits that Hawkeye isn’t actually a super hero, how it introduced as canon the concept of “Thanos was right,” the way it acknowledge the Blip/Covid in a way that very few shows could during the weird sophomore year of covid programming, the way it harvested from other existing Marvel shows from before Phase 4 in terms of big bads. On the topic of Big Bads, it introduced one of the coolest villains of all time (at least since Shang-Chi’s sister waltzed onto screen) in Echo, which will become its own show in a little more than a month!
- Moon Knight: This should’ve been really fun for me. Oscar Isaac is so good in so much, but something about the way the split personalities and voice overs worked on this show made it hard to follow and the moment that we’re teased into maybe thinking it’s all mental illness, I think I stopped watching. I think it was more of the fact that Isaac never seemed like he was super invested in being given the golden handcuffs that forced him into a perpetual contract with Marvel to play his character into retirement like Chris Hemsworth, so I just never gave him much of a chance, but maybe this actually was quite good? Hard to say (it wasn’t).
- Ms Marvel: Headwriter Bisha K Ali and directors Adil and Bilall created something really beautiful with Ms Marvel, a comic book movie about the superfan of fans starring an actual superfan, dense with intertextual references, inside jokes for MCU nerds, visual sight gags, and so so so much anime-style animated overlay to aid in storytelling. Every episode has a Western pop song in Arabic and a beautiful illustration for the credit sequence. The villain (or one of them at least) is none other than Nimra Bucha, whom we last talked about in Polite Society, which really should win best foreign film of the year. Much like the Captain America strain of the MCU, Ms Marvel recognized real life history as part of its own narrative arc. It featured some prominent bi-racial, bi-cultural families, which is always fun (almost always fun). It helps that Kamala Khan is in high school and I love stories about high school. It’s also the pinnacle of Silver Age in the sense that we have moved fully out of the classic origin story narratives and the earnest struggles between good and evil and into the retrospective mise-en-abyme funhouse mirror poetic anxiety phase, also known as Phase Four/Five of the MCU. It also includes a surprising number of incest jokes for a Marvel film!
- She-Hulk: Attorney at Law: Was a series I did not think I was going to like, initially, just because the trailer’s CGI looked bad (and that continued to be the case in the actual show), but there were a bunch of things that ultimately won me over. The long cons, the patient easter eggs and treasure chests that were buried early on only to be opened later; the callbacks and cameos to minor villains from movies’ past; the fact that Jennifer Walters really and truly does not want to be a superhero despite being very powerful, which leads to one of the other amazing things about this series; how it jumps the shark into being almost fully a courtroom drama and dating show. Episode Seven’s montage of Jennifer waiting for a return text is maybe the best dating sequence in any show. It’s also actually amazing that She-Hulk is horny and that the show questions the sexlessness of almost every other super hero. Each episode plays a lot with fan reactions, but it’s anticipating them, which makes it even more clever. The show is so self-aware about its detractors that it really becomes a sideshow of its own. Jameela Jamil is incredible and her exchanges with She-Hulk are wonderful. The all woman writing team and director combo is a cool feature. Fun fact: Wife refused to watch the finale because the penultimate episode ends with a cliffhanger about doxxing and it was too stressful for her, so I do not actually know how the series ends!
- Secret Invasion: It’s super interesting that this show has been so widely panned because it was supposed to be one of the big story arcs that got us to Phase Five and then somewhere along the way five different directors and a whole bunch of staff writers decided that they were really burnt out and dropped the ball. Haven’t finished but I definitely saw the meme with Emilia Clarke and the big Drax arm.
Which is all to say that The Marvels is doing something that to my knowledge is unheard of in the MCU, mashing together not one but two different television series with an existing superhero movie to create the quintessential team-up movie, which I’ve alluded to through a bunch of laws Friend wrote for me more than ten years ago when he had strong opinions about what super hero movies should be like: no amnesia, things that they cannot do alone together, etc. (If someone tells me that the Multiverse of Madness “technically” [What If gender bending and X-Men cameos] does all of this and did it first I’m gonna scream and you didn’t get the point.)
I know that we’re fourteen paragraphs in and haven’t discussed the actual movie yet, but now that we’ve completed what Wife describes as the “lit review” for this paper, we can discuss more wide-rangingly.
On the Queer Energy of Kamala Khan. Wife: “I’m gonna pick up on the fact that you have a room full of hand drawn pictures of you embracing Captain Marvel with hearts around you both and you can write ‘Best Friends’ over it as much as you want, but I’m still gonna know you’re super gay for Carol Danvers.”
Power Creep. What has always tickled me is the eventual explanation that we are all owed about where the fuck the most powerful being in the universe and more importantly the most powerful member of the Avengers is when the Snappening occurs, and this movie does a lovely job of explaining that power creep problem. Captain Marvel is so powerful that she needs to be constantly encountering Bigger and Bigger Bads in order to take her away from the action on Earth, otherwise every Avenger-level problem would be solved too quickly, so the fact that she’s been held up (SPOILERS?) because of intergalactic politics that she herself has caused is actually quite satisfying.
Also, also! The entire premise of this movie, the fact that the most powerful superhero in the universe and a fifteen year old fan with random powers constantly swap places whenever they cast their spells at the same time is absolutely hilarious. The consistency with which they commit to the bit is fabulous, because at slightly less than two hours long, The Marvels holds the distinction of being the most disciplined, shortest runtime for ANY MCU movie. Iman Vellani has obviously been told to just act like she would in real life if she saw any of the things happen to her in the film, which means that for most of the movie she’s screaming like she’s covered in bees who are quietly ruining the plot of a show she’s been binge-watching.
Favorite moments. “She said that so weird” is the best line. The training montage with the jump rope. When the movie movie doubles down hard on cats. But there was a thing Wife said to me about ten minutes before I went to see this movie. She wrote me: “There’s this scene I’ve been wanting to discuss with you for days. You’ll know it when you see it.” And it’s maybe the best, most absurd sequence in any Marvel movie.
Stakes. There are some! Not everyone makes it! 66% success rate! No plot armor!
Sharing is Caring. The movie corrects a longstanding bee in my bonnet from the lack of shared powers in Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings. Instead of sharing his rings with his sister, which is the obvious thing for him to do, he takes all of the fucking rings for himself. No one really comments on how stupid and selfish he is for doing this. She’s obviously a much more experienced fighter than he is, more cunning, thoughtful, so why not partner up with your sister? In The Marvels, we start from the premise that distributing power is fundamental to the success of the individual and the collective.
The “villain,” if there is one in this movie seems pretty justifiable in her aims as long as you don’t mind condoning genocide, which it seems is kind of trendy right now. She’s a lovely throwback to the old movies, pre-Thanos, and unusually for a Marvel movie our team fights her from almost the very beginning! It’s really neat to see them take a crack at it, fail, and then try again later with a different strategy. Feels so novel and fun when so much of the rest of the MCU is obsessed with this one framework of story that saves the boss fight for the end and then makes him sort of a pushover.
Nia DaCosta and the MCU may be in complete meltdown but The Marvels is a creatively rich playground of experimentation and cats.
