The superheroine overload of The Marvels comes from uniting three Marvel Comics female characters, some of whom already have multiple identities: Captain Marvel / Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), and Ms. Marvel / Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani). Their intergalactic, cross-cosmos relationships begin when they are pitched into a civil war on the planet Hala, but this is not a fantasy about outer-space adventure that inspires forms of patriotism. The Marvels is an orgy of intersectional Disney/MCU platitudes.
While progressive educators introduce adolescents to Marxist theory, Disney/MCU goes the cynical capitalist route when it indoctrinates youths through politicized make-believe. Of the three so-called Marvels, the film’s key figure is Vellani’s Kamala, a 16-year-old Asian-Indian-American nerd who writes fan fiction about her role model Captain Marvel. Her fanaticism represents a new mode of pop-culture identification — not to be associated with the Marvelettes, one of Motown’s sublime girl groups in the 1960s, whose “Please Mr. Postman,” “Beechwood 4-5789,” and the sensationally catty “Don’t Mess With Bill” represented black-American ambition and won absolute interracial assent.
By comparison, the fantasy, ambition, and politics of The Marvels is limited. The three superheroines — white Captain Marvel, Asian Kamala, and black Monica — represent a global identity crisis, fostered by Disney/Marvel’s diversity, inclusion, equity (DIE) agenda, in which tribalism persists but is narrowed to feminism über alles. (Disney also sneaked that idea into Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.) But The Marvels drives this point home when Avengers leader Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) encourages a self-doubting wannabe superheroine by shouting at her the new tribal inspirational motto: “Black-girl magic!” SamJack’s coup de grâce would bring a smile to the ghosts of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, whose 1947 Dialectic of Enlightenment popularized the Marxist academic slogan “The culture industry.”
It’s an obvious but important irony that mammoth Hollywood franchises play on Millennial insecurities; they are used for social messaging and to promote political agendas. The brainwashing starts with seemingly harmless, comic-book escapism. The Marvels derives from three different MCU projects: the Captain Marvel movie and the Ms. Marvel and WandaVision television series that share a continuous, expanded, interconnected narrative. This blatant commercialism doesn’t offend an already programmed audience of naïve consumers. In film-industry parlance, The Marvels is considered a “tentpole” holding up a newly planned circus, following the one completed by Avengers: Endgame.
Fangirl/fanboy habit automatically embraces Hollywood calculation as part of enjoying the MCU. Reviewers contribute to this hive mind by respectfully reviewing and praising the “continuity” between the various films and streaming TV series, as though performing classical exegesis. But this is false sophistication, especially in this case, when it covers up the visual ineptitude and chaos of The Marvels. Director Nia DaCosta jumps erratically between battle scenes, musical numbers, and sisterhood dialogues, all displaying that same F/X-team anonymity that ruined the Wonder Woman franchise.
DaCosta’s political identity should be irrelevant, but the film’s Black Panther–influenced race-gender blatancy makes politics unavoidable. How else to make sense of The Marvels and its conspicuous oversell? The emphasis on political identity — Larson’s RBF, Parris’s anger, and Vellani’s naïveté — recalls the multiracial multiverse gamesmanship in Everything Everywhere All at Once, which was also a Hollywood rip-off of Johnnie To’s female fighters in the Hong Kong film The Heroic Trio.
These mixed messages of empowerment and exploitation get reduced to the film’s only amusing moment: a shot of extraterrestrial felines, called the Flerken, scrambling down a flight of stairs like herded cats possibly forming a queue. (The Broadway tune “Memory,” from Cats, plays on the soundtrack, but “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game,” by the Marvelettes, would have been better.) One realizes that a franchise that has jumped the shark also mixes its metaphors.