'The Marvels' was Good. But I wish it had been Awesome.

(CONTENT WARNING: Ridiculously Self-Indulgent Armchair Quarterbacking)

(or, 'Hey, if you can't get all fan-fictiony on a film starring Kamala Khan, when CAN you?')

    One of my big problems with some of Marvel's recent cinematic offerings is a failure to adequately pay off well set-up narratives. This was particularly egregious in 'Shang Chi' but reappeared in 'The Marvels'. 

    Tony Leung's performance as Xu Wenwu set up an incredible character, drive by powerful, almost elemental passions. Despite being a near-unstoppable force of destruction and conflict, his weaknesses are exposed. Firstly, he cannot prevent himself from falling in love, and Secondly, as the saying goes, when you think like a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. 

When he loses the love of his life, the only way he knows how to respond is with violence and conquest. 

    Unfortunately, instead of using that as the emotional and narrative crux of the film, the studio throws a mess of cheap (actually, very expensive, but emotionally hollow) spectacle at us, hoping we'll be satisfied by a high-tech version of "bashing your action figures together". 

Sometimes you look for an image and find one
and think, "Is this TOO on the nose?"

    'The Marvels' has a similar problem. The set-up of the film gives us a perfect arrangement of three figures gathered around a central character. 

    To Kamala Khan, Captain Marvel is the universe's greatest hero, an invincible, infallible ideal. 

    To Dar-Benn, Captain Marvel is the annihilator, a conscienceless genocidal monster and the subject of her monomaniacal hatred.

    To Monica Rambeau, Captain Marvel is Carol Danvers, a beloved but fallible human being who, despite being someone she deeply cares for, is also someone who has greatly wronged her and her family.

    The fact that all three of them are right is what the film needed to be about. 

    And yes, it was all there, but it wasn't really communicated clearly, it was obscured by a bunch of high-tech spectacle and noise and was repeatedly shunted aside in favour of the next big expensive CGI set piece, when it should have been Front-and-Centre. 

    One of the many issues that gets levelled at superhero films in general is that so many of them come down to "giant laser coming down through a hole in the sky". The problem is that "giant laser sky hole" is not something we emotionally resonate with. It's spectacular, but it's not resonant. 

    Guilt, regret, disappointment, hero worship, bitterness, friendship, emotional support, redemption, love and hatred are things that are meaningful to us in ways that magical sky lazers can never be.

    What I'd like to have seen is a film where Carol's kicking arse, Dar-Benn is presented as a thorough-going moustache-twirling monster and Kamala's just loving being on a space adventure team up with her hero¹, while Monica is having doubts in the background...

    Until the climax, where a defeated Dar-Benn begs for Carol to just kill her so that she doesn't need to see the extinction of her people and her planet. She doesn't need to see the reproach in their faces and the hope dying in their eyes as they realize she's failed to avenge herself on the genocidal monster that's doomed them all.

    This revelation temporarily shatters Kamala's image of her heroine, and everything just seems awful. Seriously, we all loved how vibrantly joyful Iman Vellani's performance was. Imagine how heartrending seeing sadness and disillusionment on her face would be?

    In the end, as an audience, we have far more of an emotional stake in Kamala Khan being sad than we do in everyone on Hala being wiped out.

    At this point, Monica saves the day with her superpower of knowing and understanding that Carol is a beloved but deeply flawed human being. At first, Kamala's confused because she think's Monica's been acting like she hates Carol. 

    Monica explains; "No, I don't hate her; I'm mad at her because she's being a stubborn ass, but I could never hate her. She'd doing what she ALWAYS does. She's trying to do EVERYTHING by herself."²

    With that emotional climax out of the way, we go to the actual ending of the film, with all four characters using their different powers³ to work together in order to restore Hala's Sun and environment and save the goddamn universe, not with punch-ups, but with friendship, communication, understanding, an appreciation for one another's point of view and a willingness to reach out for help when you need it instead of taking on all the universe's burdens on yourself.⁴

    You can even keep the post-credits scene by having Monica push herself beyond her capacity in the find re-igniting the sun scene and vanish out of the universe. The bittersweet irony being that her and Carol had just begun the process of reconciliation.

    In the end, of course, Kamala has not only had a team up with her heroine, but ACTUALLY got to know her, and got to help her achieve something she couldn't have done alone, which makes for an even more satisfying ending for our main viewpoint character.

___________________________________________________

1. This includes making the heroes' victories more definite. The destruction of Tarnax IV felt tonally 'off' to me in that we got to see a war atrocity take place with innocent civilians dying horribly. Similarly, the fate of Aladna was ill-defined.
    If we have Dar-Benn fail or only get partial successes here, it can (a) make everything seem like much more of a jolly fun space romp to Kamala, and (b) fuel Dar-Benn's frustration, overt sense of villainy and resultant breakdown after her failure make sense.
    By the time she's failed at Aladna and her people's plight is even more desperate, her decision to destroy Earth's sun should read as absolute towering Ahab-level rage. She should be encouraged to deliver a massive villain monologue here and go full "From Hell's Heart, I Stab At Thee!"

2. This is important, because it really felt like, of the three leads, Carol had the main protagonist role and Kamala was the viewpoint character, while Monica was... well, she was there, too.  

In the end, she's the one who holds the key to the plot's final resolution because she's the one who knows Carol best, has the most complex relationship with her and understands her as a person rather than as an Archetypal Concept.

    The tension and competing mixed feelings (joy at seeing one another again and resentment at being abandoned for so long) between the two could be seeded more obviously throughout the earlier scenes.

    By doing this, it makes all four of the main protagonists vital to the plot.

3. Another minor quibble is that, while there was a lot of noise about everyone's powers, it would have been nice for them to have been better defined and for synergies to have been explored.
    In my understanding, Carol is a generator, creating vast amounts of powerful energies, however, she's pretty much a blunt object - blasting, punching and flying like a human torpedo into things.
    Monica, on the other hand is kind of like a frequency modulator. Because she can become all kinds of energy, she'd be capable of absorbing the power that Carol is putting out and shifting it up and down the electromagnetic spectrum to get exactly the frequency we're looking for. Her powers are far more surgical in their application, if a little more difficult to get your head around.
    Kamala's Quantum Band enables her to convert energy into matter. 
    While Dar-Benn's Quantum Band enables her to create wormholes in space allowing matter to pass through them. 
    So essentially, Carol creates the energy needed to reignite the sun. Monica channels the appropriate frequencies to achieve the goal they're after. Kamala converts some of that energy into the necessary chemical components (mostly Hydrogen and Helium) and Dar-Benn transports everything into the core of the star where it can begin to work. The four of them can be hooked together with appropriate bits of Kree Technology to allow them to combine their powers, boost them and channel them in such a way. 

4. As far as messages go, it's twee, trite and more than a little 'My Little Pony' but let's be fair, it's a movie that (should be) mainly aimed at kids, so there's no crime in spelling it out for the audience.            Another reason to have Dar-Benn get a (partial) redemption arc is that the scenes with her fighting Carol, Monica and Kamala didn't feel like 3 Heroes fighting a Terrible Foe as much as it felt like 3 Super-Powerful Beings whaling away on a single person. Far better to resolve it with less fighting if all the fights are going to look like 3-on-1 beatdowns.