The Marvels was not a good movie. You know that. I know you know that. We don’t need to go over all the ways it wasn’t good again. I will say it was better than Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania but that bar is so low demons in hell have ripped the bar off the floor and started beating sinners with it. Quantumania isn’t just a bad movie, it’s completely nonfunctional, and I encourage everyone who wants to write to watch it and take notes on what not to do.
Actually, you know what, fuck it, this isn’t what I wanted to get into today but we’re making a quick detour because thinking about this movie is pissing me off again.
Reasons Why Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania Isn’t Just Bad, It’s Completely Broken
- They’ve completely changed the characterization of all their main characters. Scott Lang is an ex-con who thinks that crime is perfectly okay if it’s for a good enough reason or if the victim is rich, he would not care if Cassie got arrested for protesting and would probably be proud of her.
- Nobody gets a character arc. There is no growth, there is no change, there is only a variety of multi-colored goo.
- They turned first movie villain Darren Cross into MODOK for literally no reason other than to make fun of the concept of MODOK.
- Nobody fucking talks to each other! All of the conversations between characters are entirely utilitarian, basically ‘what do we do next?’ over and over and over. Hank Pym finds out when his wife was stuck in the Quantum Realm she was casually banging Bill Murray and they don’t talk about it at all. Once they leave the scene with Bill Murray it’s like it never happened.
- Stop inviting Billy Murray to be in things. He clearly doesn’t want to be there.
- Ant-Man movies are supposed to be fun side mission stories set in San Francisco where the stakes matter to Scott, and maybe San Francisco, but not the entire MCU. Having Kang first show up in one of these things is plain stupid.
- Seriously, so fucking obvious that if this was going to involve anyone else from the wider universe it should be Shang-Chi, the only other MCU character also living full time in San Francisco, but no. Fucking Kang.
- Luis doesn’t show up for a single, God-forsaken second.
In short, maybe don’t hire a fourth-rate Rick & Morty writer and then fail to check-in on his progress.
At least The Marvels functions. However weak and half-assed they were, the main characters have growth arcs. They change. They actually talk to one another. Like, Jesus Christ, it’s the basics of screenwriting, how do you even get past 101 without…How does a script like that get approved by multiple people…
God, it makes me so angry.
The Marvels is a functioning movie but it’s still not good. And this time it’s not simply because they hired a hack TV writer and let him jerk off for hours on end.
The Movie Feels Afraid to Commit
The villain, Dar-Benn, is a Kree who had to watch Carol Danvers destroy her planet.
See, in the first Captain Marvel movie Carol finds out the ruler of the planet Hala, the Supreme Intelligence, had completely fucked her. A botched Kree mission left her with her Captain Marvel powers, and then the Supreme Intelligence in complete Panic Mode decided to bring her to Hala and brainwash her into forgetting all of her Earth memories and making her think she was a Kree police officer. Once Carol found all this out, apparently the first thing she did was fly her binary ass back to Hala to Holdo Maneuver the Supreme Intelligence. She thought she was freeing the Kree people, but actually this led to an immediate civil war followed by extreme planet destruction. The air isn’t breathable, the water is poison, and their sun is dying.
Carol Danvers was pissed and hurting, and looking for revenge, and when she lashed out she managed to fuck up an entire planet.
This is, honestly, such a cool and ballsy direction to take one of your superheroes in. She is a hero to us, yes, but to an entire other planet she is the Annihilator. She can’t do anything to fix it. She feels such tremendous guilt about the whole thing she’s put herself in self-imposed exile, refusing to stay on Earth for any longer than it takes to punch Thanos in the head, which dovetails nicely with Monica Rambeau’s feelings of abandonment and Kamala Khan’s hero worship. Through their place-swapping antics, Carol is forced to face who she is, what she did, and the people she left behind. Monica would be able to have closure with the last thing remaining of her mother, and Kamala would learn that even superheroes are just people.
All of that would have been very nice, if someone hadn’t gotten cold feet and fucked everything.
I don’t know how this happened. I know there was some ‘troubled development’ but that’s such a blanket statement it essentially tells us nothing. My guess, based on a general pattern of literal decades, is that the studio execs got cold feet and ordered changes in post. This is, again, a complete guess, I have no insider information and should not be quoted basically ever.
You don’t find out why random Kree call Carol the Annihilator until, I think, an hour into the movie. Our trio dips out of a major fight and lands on a random planet seemingly made entire out of wheat fields that just absolutely reeks of re-shoots, and Carol tearfully tells the other two that she’s the reason Hala is dying and Dar-Benn is having a normal one in the same tone she might have used to tell the neighbor kid she accidentally ran over their cat.
Then Monica and Kamala fucking race to be the first to forgive Carol and everything is happy again, yay!
It’s not even half-assed. It’s quarter-assed. It’s that part of the ass on the side that technically might be the hip.
Kamala even says, “I am sorry for coming on too strong at the beginning. I did not give you a lot of space to be a real person.” Like, she just fucking says it. She says it. She says it out loud, with her mouth, and it’s the exact thing her arc should be and yet it is completely unearned.
The entire scene takes less than two minutes.
Again, no proof, but it just feels like someone had this great, bonkers idea and someone else with much more power went, ‘Haha, no, absolutely not’ but only after they had shot too much to change the plot entirely. So instead the movie just skims the surface, never committing to its idea and making the whole endeavor feel shallow.
While this example is far more important to the movie as a whole…because, you know, it tanks the whole fucking plot…a more distilled example of the movie being unable to commit is:
The Singing Planet
There’s something about the Aladna scenes of this movie that just feel…off.
Carol thinks that Dar-Benn is going to go to the planet Aladna to steal their water for Hala because Aladna is 99.63% ocean. And the people who live on that 0.37% communicate through song. And not just song, full-on musical numbers with harmonies and coordinated dance moves. And when they land, Carol is forced to reveal that, for political reasons, she married the prince and is technically the princess of the planet and her Sunday-cozy outfit gets magically switched to a Captain Marvel themed Disney Princess dress and she’s trying to warn the Prince that the planet is about to get wrecked but she has to do so through a song and dance duet while Monica and Kamala look on in bemused horror.
The whole thing is awkward and I hate it. The only good part is Monica is somehow immediately double fisting.
This is where the half-assed nature of this movie really shines for me. I have zero proof of this, again, NOT INSIDER INFORMATION, DO NOT QUOTE, I AM AN IDIOT. But it absolutely feels like, to me, at one point this part of the movie was supposed to be much, much bigger. It’s a God-damned musical planet. It’s Planet: The Musical. This should have been a motherfucking showstopper. A blow out. All three of our main characters should have gotten costume changes and been singing, too. They should have gotten solos. The surprise musical number should have been a breakout of the movie. The song should have gotten so big it gets a single edit and ends up on the radio.
But, no. No, instead it once again feels like someone got cold feet and this idea was pulled back on at the last minute. And if that’s not what happened and this was what they wanted? Then they were wrong, they should have gone all out. This scene just feels like an awkward middle ground and makes me want whatever Monica was drinking.
Commit to the Fucking Bit
Quantumania can teach an aspiring writer just, like, an absolute mountain of shit not to do, but there’s only one main takeaway I think you should take from The Marvels and that’s to fucking commit.
Whatever weird and wild shit you want to create? Do it with your entire ass. Don’t hold back because you think people aren’t going to like it. Because guess what? A lot of people won’t. There’s eight billion people on the planet, you can’t reach them all. But if you sing your weird little song with your whole throat you are going to find the people who resonate with it and they’re going to follow you to the ends of the earth. Would a full musical number in the middle of this movie been super-ultra-duper-cringe? Yeah, maybe. But what we got is already that and its entirely forgettable.
If you’re going to give your main character a genocidal history, lean into that shit. Otherwise it starts to feel like maybe you’re, you know, sort of okay with genocide as long as its done by the ‘right’ person.
High Urban Fantasy Jazz 