The Marvels

I disagree with Scorsese's take on the MCU not being cinema but rather a theme park. Even in a theme park, you have to put in some effort to make it look presentable in order to make profit. Marvel has become a product that seems to have forgotten about logic, storytelling, and most importantly, the audience. And well, the audience has spoken with their wallets and made it pretty clear to Disney that they're not digging this direction. It feels like Marvel is catering to a specific target audience, but definitely not the one that made the MCU the phenomenon it once was. Now, don't get me wrong. It's not as much of a trainwreck as Eternals, and some of the action scenes are actually pretty well shot. But the overwhelming sense of boredom and helplessness? That's hard to shake off. If I had to pinpoint just one of the many annoying aspects, it'd be Samuel L. Jackson's lackluster performance. It feels like he showed up, recited a few lines, collected his paycheck, and couldn't care less about anything else. It's probably one of the most half-hearted performances of his career. MCU Phase 4 was a misstep, and Phase 5 seems to be following down this downward spiral. (22/02/2024)

Better than Quantumania and I do believe Nia DaCosta is a talented director. The problem is that she said she wanted to make a film that her young daughter would enjoy watching. And that's it. The target audience for this mess is somewhere between the ages of five and early adolescence, and the rest of us are probably going to have a hard time digesting this over-the-top girl-power manifesto, and with a female villain who is the biggest casting blunder in the entire Marvel franchise. Yes, it's got one funny idea (the scene to the music of A.L. Webber), but watching the rest of it is only entertaining in its reassurance of how Marvel is in a downhill and doesn't know which way to go. (18/01/2024)

A below-average and obviously mismanaged Marvel film, which impresses with unexpectedly decent action scenes and some chemistry between the central trio. Apart from that, it can only offer a not very interesting story, boring visuals and really very poor attempts to work with the characters and their psychology. And some really really idiotic ideas. It's not a complete blunder like, say, the latest Thor, but it's not a good movie either. (09/11/2023)

The Marvels relies on an all-female (super)heroic cast, but this can have its pitfalls. I'll start by saying that I was expecting a more feminist-tinged charge, but The Marvels keeps a pretty low profile in this regard. What couldn't be overlooked, however, was the very blatant targeting of the girl audience in places: we haven't had this many girls (and babes, for which I give a thumbs up though). The BFF-line was too forced, and the post-credit scene only sealed this "blatant targeting". But whatever! Fortunately, The Marvels has an optimal running time and offers clear and brisk action, but it also has a reprehensibly bland villain and a couple of WTF-moments (the Bollywood-tinged visit to Aladna was, ahem, weird). All in all, marginally better than Ant-Man 3. (12/11/2023)

From the first trailer, this light-hearted-looking film with three heroines is very much about the heroines, and it's light-hearted to boot. Oh, yeah. I really liked The Marvels, perhaps because I wasn't expecting a second Civil War, perhaps because I don't mind switching and looking at different movies through different eyes. So I enjoyed not only the interplay of the central trio, but also looking for that interplay, with the most important role played by the perfect Iman Vellani as Kamala. It's hard to imagine a better guide through the Marvels story than an enthusiastic teenage girl who finally made it from a show to a movie and from dreams to their realization. The film is light, fun, colorful, has an understandably driven female villain, an absolutely great score (Laura Karpman, do some Star Wars, please), including a musical passage where Disney kind of pokes fun at itself, imaginative action passages with character flipping, effective humor in scenes like "Nick Fury and Kamala's family", as if cut from an Emmerich flick,... And there are cats and Cats! The most likeable Marvel movie in a long time. (16/11/2023)