The Marvels

Captain Marvel is one of my favorite productions from the MCU, and I loved the Ms Marvel TV series, so I have been eagerly awaiting the movie in which Carol Danvers and Kamala Khan finally get to meet. The addition of Monica Rambeau, whom we first met as a young girl in Captain Marvel, is an added bonus.

I should say right up front that you may struggle to follow some of the events of The Marvels if you have not seen certain other parts of the MCU output. The Khan family will be unknown to you if you have not seen Ms Marvel, though they very quickly establish themselves as central to the movie. Kamala’s relationship with her mother is a wonderful thing, and if you haven’t seen the TV series then you should. Also Monica acquires her powers during WandaVision. This is faintly alluded to in the film, but the explanation may be confusing if you didn’t know which witch she is referring too.

Worse still, there is a whole huge piece of the plot that Marvel managed to lose. After the events of Captain Marvel, Carol travelled to the Kree homeworld, Hala, and destroyed The Supreme Intelligence, the AI who ruled over the Kree. Her intention was to put a stop to the Kree-Skrull wars, but her actions precipitated a civil war amongst the Kree which led to an ecological disaster on Hala. This was, apparently, originally part of the first movie. Quite rightly, it got cut, but in the sequel it is told only in flashbacks and I worry that the entire motivation for the Kree is unclear.

The film also directly contradicts one of the key points from Secret Invasion. In that TV series it is asserted than Carol and Nick Fury were unable to find a sanctuary world for the Skrulls, but in this film we get to see a world that Skrulls have settled.

Anyway, our main villain is Dar-Benn, a Kree woman who has taken over the job of Ronan the Accuser (whom you may remember met a sticky end in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1), and who blames Carol for the problems the Kree are having. She acquires a powerful weapon that allows her to steal natural resources from other worlds so that she can restore Hala to life. The fact that those other worlds are inhabited is entirely irrelevant to her.

So that’s our plot, but frankly none of this matters. Because what we have here is a gloriously silly film full of entertainment aimed largely at a female audience. We have the Kahns, of course. We have the complication that Carol promised young Monica that she’d be back soon, and then never returned to Earth (except briefly for Endgame). There is an interlude in which we discover that Carol has a whole other life as a Disney Princess on a planet of singing and dancing aliens. We have angst, we have sisterhood, and of course we have Goose, the alien squid-cat thing.

Reader, I have not laughed so much at a movie in decades. I cried quite a bit too. I can’t wait to see it again.

Thinking back on it, there are loose ends that worry me. Most importantly, I want to know what happened to the singing-dancing aliens because it seemed like our heroes failed to prevent the Kree from destroying their planet. I think that Kamala needs to go back there and do a Bollywood dance number.

Also there are the credit scenes. We are now very much heading into the creation of the Young Avengers (and l loved the reference to Fury’s original recruitment speech to Tony Stark). I very much want to see Kamala Khan, Kate Bishop and America Chavez in action together. We also got a brief view of someone special that caused me to squeal with delight.

Yep, I’m a hopeless Marvel fangirl. I’m sure there are more good movies to come.