The Marvels (2023)

Directed by Nia DaCosta. Starring Brie Larson, Iman Vellani, Teyonah Parris, Samuel L. Jackson, Zawe Ashton, Zenobia Shroff, Mohan Japur, Park Seo-joon, Saagar Shaikh, Gary Lewis. [PG-13]

If I’d been taking more diligent notes, the first one, scribbled after the first 15-20 minutes, would have surely been: “I have no idea what is going on.” During that stretch, things were happening beyond my comprehension and characters filled the screen who were complete mysteries to me (other than Captain Marvel, Nick Fury, and the cat-alien). Worse, nothing about the way the disparate scenes were written or structured encouraged me to lock on and try to work it out for myself…not that I imagine I’d have had much luck if I’d tried. I could describe the plot in a sentence or two, but you’re better off just looking it up on Wikipedia, which is where I learned I needed to have watched a television show I’d never even heard of (“Ms. Marvel”) to understand what was going on, and that’s a big ask for a big-budget event movie which should appeal to moviegoers outside the rabid, “multi-platformed” faithful. It may not be for the unlearned (me), but I’m open-minded about movies, and am willing to give these things a chance, even with rampant superhero fatigue spreading across the globe; this is just willful restriction. A few minutes of introductions and explanations scattered here and there…that’s all I’m asking. And better storytelling and characters, seeing as how I not only struggled to parse out the unimpressive villain’s motivations/plan, I couldn’t even remember her name. The incoherence in the plotting is mirrored in the disorganized visuals/action, which go pow, pop, zing, and rarely make a lick of spatial sense or produce any recognizable consequences. Should I be grateful the movie doesn’t suffer from tedious bloat (it’s the shortest MCU outing to date, clocking in under 100 minutes minus the end credits), or wish it was longer in order to make room for those flashback/exposition footnotes I craved? Eh, I’m a sucker for kitty cats, so I liked the herding part, at least. Among the handful of cameo appearances, I knew who Tessa Thompson and Kelsey Grammer were playing (but not how they should connect to this particular storyline); not so much Hailee Steinfeld, though.

40/100