REVIEW: The Marvels (2023) – Geeks + Gamers

REVIEW: The Miracles (2023)

The wonders It’s not good, but it’s also not quite as bad as I imagined. If we’re playing MCU Russian Roulette, I’d rather watch this than Eternal, Thor: Love and Thunderor Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. But it’s still a pretty crappy movie, another thrown together afterthought from Marvel with weak characters, a confused plot, terrible filmmaking, humor without laughs, and a few good ideas that go nowhere.

As Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) and SWORD agent Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) investigate a strange space anomaly, she and Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) suddenly begin to swap places when using their powers. As they try to resolve their body swap issue, the new Kree ruler Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) searches for Kamala’s bracelet so she can harness its power.

The body swapping element of The wonders Leading up to the film, a lot of people were scratching their heads. It seemed to work inconsistently and didn’t seem particularly like an anchor for a superhero action movie. And that turned out to be true; It’s very inconsistent and doesn’t add much to the film because it comes and goes, and its resolution isn’t explained very well. It’s mostly a reason to bring Carol, Monica and Kamala together, but it’s a shame the script didn’t try to do more with it. You can use something like this to teach the characters a lesson, e.g. B. Taking responsibility or being considerate of others before acting.

The latter would have been a good lesson for Carol, as she is the cause of much of the conflict The wonders; Without giving too much away, she did something outside of the movie (well, it’s shown in the movie, but in a quick flashback halfway through) that was disastrous for the Kree homeworld. It’s a good idea and it could have made a much better film. Is Carol acting too rashly? Is she so in love with herself and her powers that she doesn’t think about who might get hurt when she uses them? Can she perhaps learn to control her impulses when using her powers could result in the death of a teenager who idolizes her? This sounds like a more thoughtful film, but The wonders doesn’t dwell on all these unpleasant things; It’s more interested in crazy predicaments and cats.

This also applies to the villain Dar-Benn. Given their history and their zealous devotion to their people and their world, their motivation should have been Kree survival. Kree is in danger and in an early scene she tries to make peace with the Skrulls to help both her races. There’s a lot of potential here, too, and it’s a sign of how desperation can drive someone to abandon deeply held beliefs in the name of inevitable reality. But The wonders omits this to turn her into a one-note heavy bent only on destruction, and the character isn’t nearly cool or intimidating enough to be interesting in that role. Zawe Ashton’s appearance doesn’t help; She plays Dar-Benn as a fanatical madman rather than a driven patriot, which is a mistake. She could have been one of the MCU’s more sympathetic villains; Instead, she’s just another Malekith, without the personality.

Not that she’s dealing with a team of outstanding heroes. The main actresses of The wonders are what a million jokes said before the film’s release: three characters put together because they aren’t strong enough to anchor their own film. Carol is fine, definitely better than in her other major performances. She is no longer as smug as before Captain Marvel or Endgame, so you don’t groan when she shows up. But she’s also not committed; She doesn’t have the personality of a Tony Stark, a Steve Rogers or a Thor Odinson. So aside from her being the hero, don’t feel the need to root for her in the same way. Kamala has the opposite problem: she is too much. Her bubbly personality of Ms. Marvel is set to infinity, so she’s constantly screaming in joy (or fear) and making silly faces. You’d think Monica would be the balance between the two, but she’s more like Carol; She’s boring, just there to be there. So there are your three heroes – two who don’t pop and one who explodes into glitter.

The supporting characters don’t add much either. Nick Fury is obviously the best, but he’s also inconsistent. He has one or two cool moments, but sometimes he acts out of character and says things you would never have imagined Nick Fury saying. (By the way, just to save you the trouble, you don’t have to have seen it Secret invasion understand The wonders; (This was a ploy to get you to subscribe to Disney+.) Kamala’s family is back Ms. Marvel, and they refuse to go away. I know a lot of people seem to like them, but to me they’re just annoying, and in this movie they take up time that could have been devoted to something else. Park Seo-joon (who I don’t know from Adam, but people made a point of him being here, so I guess he’s popular) plays Prince Yan, and he has the personality of a lampshade; He’s also at the center of one of the most confusing scenes in any Marvel production, something so strange and cheesy that I don’t know how he managed to get over a pitch in a meeting. (And it’s not even the stupidest thing ever The wonders; Fury’s solution to a particular problem is so stupid in every way that it feels like it was added to the script in crayon.)

Technically, The wonders doesn’t land either. Nia DaCosta is another Marvel director who doesn’t know how to shoot an action scene, and the fights in this film are never clear. The camera gets too close, zooms around quickly, and sometimes makes it hard to see who’s hitting who. In the climactic battle against Dar-Benn, one of the three heroes lands a serious blow on her, but I have no idea which one. You’d think they would have incorporated body swapping into combat as a strategy, making the heroes use it to their advantage to defeat an overpowered enemy, but no. The editing is also poor, with sudden cuts that give the impression that the scenes are incomplete; I suspect this is because the film was edited so many times and many of them were last minute edits. But The wonders This makes it look shabby, and some moments that should have played longer were abandoned for much less interesting scenes. The music feels like an AI attempt to emulate generic superhero music; I think that might be the case Captain Marvel Topic because it looks familiar but I don’t remember. Either way it’s not good. I have to say that I enjoyed the special effects for the most part; Some of them are outlandish, but others are really good, especially the opening shot of an endangered planet.

It’s hard to be angry The wonders, if only because it’s hard to feel much about it. It could be worse; It could have been much, much, much better. Carol is more palatable than in other films and the special effects are mostly good. But Monica is boring, Kamala is pretentious, it’s a million too cute, the villain is an idiot, the action is confusing, and so on and so forth. In other words, it’s another Marvel time filler, which seems to be all they’re making anymore.