'The Marvels' is a symptom of a much wider problem with Marvel itself

Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) finds herself trading places with two other women - astronaut Monica Rambeau (Teyonnah Parris) and high-schooler Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) - whenever they try to use their similar powers. Forced to team up together, they soon find themselves facing off against a vengeful alien warlord (Zawe Ashton) who has a personal vendetta against Danvers and is bent on harvesting the resources of Earth's sun to restore her homeworld...

As much as you can come into 'The Marvels' unaware of the swirling rumours surrounding its stars, the uncertainty of where the grand narrative of Marvel is heading, not to mention the long-waging strike action and a bombshell report in Variety about problems behind the scenes, there's no denying something isn't working. You can see it in the vague, disinterested look in Brie Larson's face for most of the movie. You can hear it in the clunky dialogue growled out by Zawe Ashton. You can feel it in the air of contractually obligated performances from everyone involved, bar Iman Vellani's self-aware fangirl character.

At 105 minutes, 'The Marvels' moves at a frantic pace, cramming in setup and backstory for the vast majority of people who didn't watch 'Ms. Marvel' or 'Secret Invasion' and haven't been keeping up with the entangled multiversal thing that's going on in Marvel. Beyond all that, however, 'The Marvels' is business as usual and ticks all of the boxes - good and bad - we've come to expect in a Marvel movie. CGI finale battle? Check. Self-aware, borderline smug humour? Check. Other characters from other movies and TV shows referenced and brought in at the last minute to help fill in for chainsaw editing? Check, check, and check again.

What feels clear from watching 'The Marvels' is that the movie was heavily edited in postproduction, though some of the action setpieces are staged and shot very well with all of the criss-crossing 'Freaky Friday' being pulled off with remarkable ease. Beyond that, however, 'The Marvels' is much as what's been done before. Zawe Ashton's villain is totally underutilised, with her Balenciaga-adjacent get-up complete with teeth grills and grey eye contacts doing far too much work. Brie Larson, meanwhile, isn't so much phoning it in as much as she's doing her performances via Zoom. Teyonah Parris is doing her best, but there's a professionalism about her performance that betrays a complete lack of interest in the role. The only one who actually seems to be enjoying themselves and wants to be there is Iman Vellani, who is not only playing a fangirling superhero in this but is an actual Marvel fangirl in real life.

Undoubtedly, the so-so reviews and the middling box-office that 'The Marvels' is likely to get will give licence to some of the worst parts of the internet to believe that having a trio of women leading a comic-book movie is the reason for all of it. This isn't the case at all. 'The Marvels' is a symptom of a wider problem. Namely, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is now flaming itself out by cranking out the same thing over and over again with little ingenuity. Even when Marvel was at its cultural zenith a few years ago, this was still a problem - but you had directors willing and able to grapple with the machinery to make something beyond mere content. James Gunn's 'Guardians of the Galaxy' trilogy, Taika Waititi's 'Thor Ragnarok', Destin Daniel Cretton's 'Shang-Chi' and Ryan Coogler's 'Black Panther' all managed to craft something special, so what happened here?

The problem isn't director Nia DaCosta's fault, who clearly took this as a job to move her career to the next step. Nor is it necessarily Brie Larson's fault either, who has been subjected to the worst kind of online abuse simply for being an articulate woman and for playing a superhero. If the Marvel Cinematic Universe is going to sustain itself, it's going to have to move past its current formula and start taking some chances than merely pandering to its base with teases of familiar faces and the like. 'The Marvels' is the same movie you've seen before, not necessarily done better or worse, but just the same. Even with galaxy-trotting superheroes, Supreme Intelligences, old characters and new ones, it's the same stock-in-trade all over again and again being cranked out to cinemas with diminishing returns.