International Women's Day: The Marvels

To recap, my position on The Marvels at the end of 2023:

1) I'm definitely not seeing it in the theater, but

2) I'll definitely see it if it streams on Disney+ before my ranking deadline, which it did not, which is okay because

3) I'm feeling kind of backlashy toward Brie Larson, for reasons that may be valid but might align me with people I don't want to be aligned with, and besides

4) Not seeing it would allow me to finish watching Ms. Marvel on Disney+ before I see it.

But really, what I worried people thought when I didn't rank it was "He just doesn't want to see it cuz there's girls in it."

People who know me know that's not the case, but I'm thinking about all those people who don't know me.

So to atone, I watched it last night on International Women's Day. 

It's only been a tradition for me to watch a movie to celebrate International Women's Day for one year. Last year I finished off my best picture nominees by watching Women Talking, which hadn't yet been accessible to me on my ranking deadline, and that experience had a good ending. I say "ending" because I thought the start of that movie was stilted, but I came around on it pretty strongly by the time it reached the finish line.

No such finish for The Marvels, but I will say that it also went up for me a half-star by the end. Unfortunately, instead of that getting it up to the four stars Women Talking received, it got it up to only 2.5.

The Marvels has been streaming on Disney+ for about a month now, and considering that I've watched two 2023 best picture nominees as well as one other 2023 film that wasn't nominated for anything, the lid was officially off the prohibition against watching movies from the previous year in the wake of closing my list. In fact, I'd already been eyeing it for a viewing for several weeks now. Once a Marvel die-hard, always a Marvel die-hard, I guess -- even after consciously acknowledging that Marvel movies don't carry the likelihood of success with me that they once did.

The thing is, there was one thing holding me back: Finishing Ms. Marvel, as I said n point 4 above that I intended to do.

To recap that one, we started watching it as a family not long after it debuted in the middle of 2022. But after about two episodes, the kids admitted they weren't drawn in by it. My wife and I were disappointed, but not enough to continue watching it on our own after they went to sleep for the night. 

I did try to pick it up again last month, to prepare for the Marvels viewing that I didn't care enough about to prioritize a viewing in the theater. I guess that was too much preparation for too many things I didn't care enough about. A pause of 18 months fatally sapped my interest in finishing Ms. Marvel. I'd watch halves of episodes before either falling asleep or moving on to something else, and in the halves I did watch, even though I watched them consecutively in terms of the narrative, I felt myself confused about what was happening.

And then I realized a simple thing: I'm not in a place right now to be a Marvel completist both in terms of Marvel television and Marvel movies. It's enough to be a Marvel movie completist, which I am again now. Stuff may have happened in Hawkeye and Secret Invasion and She-Hulk that has some bearing on these movies, but I've gotten by without watching those shows. Ms. Marvel would just be the same.

And in truth, the only thing I probably needed to know that I didn't get from three-and-a-half episodes of the show was that Kamala Khan did indeed come into her powers and that the members of her family survived the experience. Which is what I would have guessed before I watched one minute of the first episode.

Okay let's get back to this movie.

It's fine. I have no interest in getting all hatery and saying how it's a disaster. It's competently made and I didn't find the characters grating in any way. I have actively positive thoughts toward Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau and especially the delightful Iman Kellani as Ms. Marvel, essentially our viewer surrogate in this film. They did their level best to try to make both the actress and the character a bit more accessible in terms of Larson as Carol Danvers, surely absorbing some of the backlash that involved Larson being difficult to work with and feeling too arrogant about her character's powers. But I still caught her posing with a superior look on her face one too many times for my liking.

There's a problem that remains with Captain Marvel, which is that she is, by some descriptions, the most powerful character in the entire MCU, and yet you can't have a protagonist who doesn't have vulnerability. I must admit that I didn't work very hard to piece together the plot of this movie and whether it made sense or was satisfying, but I had a hard time feeling like Carol was in danger at any given moment. At the same time, they have to specifically not have her use some percentage of her powers to solve problems so she doesn't just fly into everything and zap a supernova at it, which it seems she is capable of doing. By being too strong, the character has possibly unsolvable problems in terms of building stakes and creating tension in the narrative.

I did like the bit about how the three main women switch places, though again, I didn't really understand how or why it was happening and what the rules were. Therefore, I couldn't tell if the gimmick was being used cleverly or fairly. The enjoyment I got there was purely surface level.

Then I will also admit liking the scene with all the newborn cats, which I won't spoil if you haven't seen it, even if that whole joke is the sort of thing we've already seen in four Men in Black movies.

So let's drop the qualitative analysis of the movie for a moment and see how it does as a viewing on International Women's Day.

I feel like there is something smart in the construction of this movie as being divided between three main female characters. Even though more women may be more triggering for the wrong segment of the public, Marvel has not been catering to that segment of the public for years, if ever. What it does for people who are less extreme in their anathema to heroines is it divides it equally between three characters, rather than providing a monolithic single character against whom to expend your negative thoughts. To some this is just woker and woker, but again I say, those people can go suck an egg.

I also do think there is something useful about the movie in terms of being post the most obvious subtext of any movie involving female superheroes: namely, the chip on its shoulder about being able to do anything a man can do. We've had enough female superhero movies now that those original gestures are now too simplistic of a goal in this type of movie. As with any representation hurdle we must overcome, the first step is to overcome it, and to tell your audience that you are doing so in no uncertain terms, so they're not too thick to get it. Then, you get to a point where the representation alone is enough and you don't have to draw extra attention to why you were fighting for that representation in the first place.

I think The Marvels is in that spot, which is good. The fact that it doesn't totally succeed -- in fact, that it doesn't even succeed enough to earn the minimum three stars for a recommendation -- isn't on the women, or on director Nia DaCosta, who does a good job with the material in terms of her specific responsibilities. (Though she does share the writing credit with two other women, and that particular trio may not do their job as well as the trio they are writing about.)

No, The Marvels is a disappointment because 33 MCU movies have raised the bar to impossible heights in terms of what qualifies as something new or interesting. Even the trio of female superheroes is not particularly new, in the wake of that famous scene in Avengers: Endgame where all the female Avengers assembled on the battlefield to walk together in slow motion. And space? I feel like fully half of the ongoing MCU properties are now set in space, even if it is outer space-resembling inner space, like in the last Ant-Man movie.

I'm glad I watched it on International Women's Day, though, if only for the benefit of that hypothetical bean counter I often reference, who may be taking note of spikes in streams and may correlate that to a day dedicated to women. I still want to appreciate women, even if I didn't appreciate this movie as much as I'd hoped.

Can I blow off The Marvels?

Oh sure, Vance. The first Marvel movie with a cast that is basically all women and a Black man, and you want to blow it off?

Now hold on a minute, I have my reasons.

1) I have to admit, the Brie Larson backlash has gotten to me. I take backlash against famous women with a grain of salt, but enough of what I've read about how difficult Larson is to be around has seeped through the first few layers. It sounds like she takes playful bantering with co-stars in interviews and makes it overly competitive and a little distasteful. It sounds like she let playing such a powerful character go to her head, and she felt like she was the character. It sounds like maybe winning an Oscar also went to her head. Is this fair? I doubt it. Has it created a real wariness in me? It has.

2) I didn't get to finish the Ms. Marvel series on Disney+ because my kids didn't like it. I think we watched two episodes, both of which my wife and I liked. My kids couldn't care less. And it's not that they are anti-Marvel, though I haven't seen them clamoring to watch any of the recent movies. We're watching Loki and they like it, probably more than I do this season. They just didn't go for it. I feel like it would be ideal to have the connective tissue from that series when coming into this movie.

3) Marvel fatigue. It's real, even for (especially for?) a guy who has seen all the movies. The third Ant-Man stinks and I was ultimately mildly disappointed by the final Guardians of the Galaxy. There's nothing that states I have to be a Marvel completist, especially when it's getting to the point where their first 40 movies are already planned out.

However, I should mention the pros:

1) The movie is only 105 minutes long. If I'm correctly remembering what I read somewhere, that makes it either the second or third shortest Marvel movie. And it's about half the length of Avengers: Endgame. (Then again, that was one of my favorite Marvel movies.)

2) My favorite use of Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury was in the first Captain Marvel movie, Captain Marvel. He's seemed like a bit of an add-on in the other movies, but he felt fully integrated in that movie and was funny as hell.

I think the real issue is that I feel compelled to watch it because of a perceived interest by my readership. Not this readership, but the ReelGood readership. I have of course missed reviewing my fair share of tentpole movies in the nearly four years I have been running this site, but each time I do, I feel like it erodes the site's credibility just a little bit. Is that fair? I doubt it. Has it created a real wariness in me? It has.

More than anything it creates a tangentially related crisis, which is that I don't know what my readership really wants. Theoretically this is an Australian review site, meaning that at least some heed should be paid to films of Australian origin. Also, the site was started with a real indie sensibility, pitched to readers with the same aesthetic values.

Do those readers care about -- checking the actual number now -- the 33rd Marvel movie?

Maybe I just won't see it and find out. 

"Children, what do you know about Avengers: Endgame?"

My plan to watch the first two Marvel Spider-Man movies with my kids before taking them to No Way Home on Saturday -- thereby fitting in a crucial end-of-year screening while also getting credit for a family activity -- hit an unanticipated snag. 

All was going fine until mid-way through our first viewing, 2017's Spider-Man: Homecoming, on Sunday afternoon. The kids were enjoying it, laughing in the right spots, providing the sort of commentary about the action that indicates full engagement.

Then I realized that our viewing of the Marvel movies out of sequence would finally have its first negative repercussions when we got to the next movie.

Spider-Man: Far From Home was the first movie released after Avengers: Endgame in 2019, the official beginning of the MCU's Phase Four. Where spoilers had never been a problem previously, they would immediately become so at this juncture. 

And though I'm sure you've seen Avengers: Endgame, now would be the correct time to issue a SPOILER ALERT.

Until now, the only things that could be "spoiled" from earlier Marvel movies were various plot-based twists and turns in the serpentine narrative, which is now 27 movies in length, and was already 21 at the time Endgame was released. Because these are superhero movies, the hero generally survives, leaving only weird references to Sokovia and the like as unexperienced events that could throw my kids for a loop, but only momentarily as they would just forget them and move on.

The death of Tony Stark, however, changed all that.

And while I heard my kids laughing and providing commentary, my mind raced ahead to how I was going to deal with the fact that they didn't know this had happened. It was like my worries of The Empire Strikes Back being prematurely spoiled all over again.

Watching the Avengers movies before Saturday was out of the question, even if I were inclined to do so. Even just watching Endgame was out of the question, as I would never dream of depriving someone of at least Infinity War as part one of the two-part story. I would also never dream of watching a three-hour movie with my kids, especially not this week. Then there's the fact that Infinity War contains what I consider the most shocking and potentially traumatizing moment in the entire MCU, the strangulation death of _____ by Thanos at the beginning. (I didn't give a spoiler warning for Infinity War, so I'll just leave out the name of that character.) It's that exact moment that caused me to wade into MCU viewings with my kids only very gingerly. It might be even more traumatizing considering that we only recently watched and quite enjoyed a show devoted entirely to this character. (Oops, so much for being vague.)

But I didn't want to abandon these viewings either. I need to get in Spider-Man: No Way Home on before I close off my 2021 rankings. With the hype it has received, not seeing it in time to rank it is just not an option. 

I thought of just skipping Spider-Man: Far From Home, which is like a non-stop Tony Stark memorial from start to finish. (Or from Stark to finish, you could say.) At least the kids would have one Tom Holland Spider-Man movie before seeing the newest one. But as I had already promised them both movies, I couldn't really renege now. Nor, as a proud film enthusiast and curator, did I consider it responsible to show them the third in a trilogy without showing them the second.

So I decided to put the issue to them and see what they wanted to do about it.

Tuesday afternoon I asked the older one, who is 11, the question you see in the title of this post. He was helping me put a shade cover on our new trampoline at the time.

"Something about Thanos gathering infinity stones to wipe out half the population."

"That's Avengers: Infinity War," I explained. "What do you know about Endgame?"

"Then nothing I guess," was the response.

The playground chatter that had given him the details of Thanos' master plan had not produced the end result from the second movie. I guess a bejeweled glove is more fascinating to the playground crowd than the death of Iron Man.

So I asked him what he thought of the fact that there would be spoilers from Endgame in the next Spider-Man movie. When he asked what kind of spoiler, I said it had to do with characters dying.

"No, I want to avoid that," he said.

Damn.

I punted for now and returned my focus to attaching the trampoline roof.

Because I had deemed Tuesday the best time to watch Far From Home before Saturday, and around 5:30 the best time to schedule the watch, I had to return to the topic later on, this time involving his brother.

I said we could either watch it and have the spoiler occur, or we could skip this movie and just go straight to third -- which a friend had told me did not include very much, if any, talk of Stark's death, if he remembered correctly.

The older one wanted to skip, the younger seemed horrified by that idea.

We settled on the compromise that I and my eight-year-old would watch Far From Home, and my 11-year-old would skip it. But almost immediately, he decided that if we were going to watch the movie he would just watch it as well.

As it turned out, I almost didn't need to worry.

One of the very first things that happens in the movie -- after the cold open featuring Michael Keaton's Vulture -- is a tribute on Peter Parker's high school news program to the fallen Avengers. Not just Stark, but also Captain America, Black Widow and Vision. I sat there their cringing at the enormity of the information being dumped on them. (After all, we'd watched Vision in Wandavision as well.)

You know what? Went right over their heads. 

Huh? 

Kids are funny sometimes.

I have to wonder if they didn't process it because they thought they knew how movies worked, and there was no way any of these characters could be dead. (Is Steve Rogers dead or is he just really, really old?) 

When I was able to exhale, I ventured a pause to make sure they understood what The Blip was and how it worked, how some characters were gone for five years and then came back.

"Don't spoil it!" the 11-year-old said. "Wait is that the spoiler?"

I hit play again without confirming or denying.

It went on this way, becoming more comical with each oblique reference to Tony's death. And by "oblique" I don't mean the references were indirect to any normal adult. My children apparently needed someone to say "Tony Stark is dead" for them to actually get that this happened.

Phrasing very close to that, which could not be mistaken for anything else, finally occurred during the "nightmare" that Mysterio creates for Spider-Man, one of several illusions Mysterio creates whose logistics are basically impossible to understand. At this point it took the eight-year-old to finally ask the question:

"Wait, did Tony Stark die?"

By way of confirmation, I put my hand on his back.

The revelation didn't derail anything. The laughter and the commentary continued. The kids loved the movie -- one or both of them called it their favorite of all time, which is something they say after basically every movie they see. (Most recently: Ghostbusters: Afterlife.) I myself liked the movie a lot better than I had the first time. I still find the Mysterio stuff kind of weak, but anything related to the high school students is gold, and I like Zendaya a lot more these days than I ever used to.

Some concern for Tony did finally arrive during the closing credits, at which point, the 11-year-old asked if Tony had come back to life yet in the ensuing Marvel movies. Maybe they get how these movies work after all.

"Not so far," I said, helpfully leaving the door open for his eventual resuscitation, if any emotional comfort was needed in that moment, if there had been any tainting of another recent first-time viewing -- the original Iron Man.

It doesn't seem that there was. They were screaming and bouncing on the trampoline a few minutes later.

"Not so far," my response to the prospect of Tony returning, was not a lie. I get how these movies work too. You telling me we're never going to see Iron Man in a movie again? Of course we are. He just won't be played by Robert Downey Jr. (Or maybe he even will be. Never rule anything out. The aforementioned Michael Keaton is playing Batman again, isn't he?)

So a tricky scenario tackled in the best way it could have been tackled: head on.

And at least now they'll have the context for all the ways I imagine their noodle is going to be fried in Spider-Man: No Way Home. I won't be able to pause this one to explain anything that's happening, including the Easter Eggs for the five live action Spider-Man movies that they haven't seen. 

My wife, who was expecting to be busy during that block of time, may actually join us for the viewing. She probably hasn't seen a Spider-Man movie since the Tobey Maguire original. Let's hope her adult brain can just go with it in the moment. 

Not the type of Marvel fan I thought I was

Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger were released consecutively in the summer of 2011, exactly ten years ago today in the case of the second movie, which came out July 22nd of that year. When I started writing this a couple days ago, I noticed the fortuitous timing related to the anniversary and ended up being able to hold it until today. (Numbers guys like me get off on stuff like this.)

The release of First Avenger -- when I saw the movie six months later, anyway -- was kind of a watershed moment for me in terms of my MCU fandom. I had greeted Thor with a kind of perplexed bemusement, considering the whole idea of superheroes from space to be anathema to what I expected from the genre. I recognized some strengths to the film, but overall, I didn't like it, and this was already a pattern in the movies that Marvel had released to this point. I rated Iron Man significantly lower than most people, thought The Incredible Hulk was okay but forgettable, and didn't even see Iron Man 2 until more than a year after its release (11/27/11), and about six weeks after I saw Thor (10/15/11).

Despite the way the MCU was regularly disappointing me, I dutifully saw Captain America: The First Avenger on January 3rd of the new year, or another six weeks after that. Something about this film finally unlocked these movies for me. I loved the World War II setting -- a similar setting worked for me in Wonder Woman -- and I really appreciated the set design and artistic direction. The action scenes had a kind of kinetic quality that I hadn't seen before in the MCU.

After that, it was rare that I disliked any other MCU films. There were a few -- I wasn't hot on Doctor Strange when I first saw it, and the second Avengers seemed like a turd at the time, though I bet I'd think differently if I watched it today -- but overall I've been mostly on board with what they do. (He says, with the selective memory of just having not liked Black Widow.)

One thing that was consistent was that I always liked anything with Captain America in it. It didn't have anything to do with Chris Evans, though I've grown to love his political activism and the fact that he's from the same hometown as I am (Boston). No, there was just something about these stories, about how Joe Johnston and then the Russo brothers were telling them, that clicked with me, as the sequels to those movies (The Winter Soldier and Civil War) remain personal favorites. Captain America was my gateway into the larger MCU.

Of course, in time, I grew fond of Thor. Ragnarok is top five MCU for me, which is no small statement given that they now have 24 films, and will be over 30 before you know it. (Sometime next year, to be exact.) The whole "superheroes from space" thing still seemed sort of weird to me, but given how many other times Marvel has gone to that well -- Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain Marvel being prime examples -- my objection to dosing the superhero movie with science fiction started to seem arbitrary. I had to accept it or not even bother watching these films, so accept it I did.

Ten years after my Thor/Captain America watershed moment, there happen to be two TV shows on Disney+ that have grown out of those particular storylines, one of which I've just finished (Loki) and one of which I am now just over halfway through (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier).

And you know what? I've done a complete reversal.

If Marvel movies are generally split between things that might happen (Captain America) and things that could not happen (Thor), I now find myself in the other camp.

I suspect I'd still love those Captain America movies -- The First Avenger is the only one I've seen more than once -- but this show that uses characters first introduced to us in that storyline? I'm finding it to be a slog. The second episode was better than the first, but then the third and fourth took a step backward again.

Meanwhile, Loki was a constant delight, an example of the imaginations of creative people turned up to 11. It built on what WandaVision had done, the latter also being an example of the outlandish multiverse-type thinking that originally bothered me about a planet populated by Viking gods.

The comparative realism of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier just feels gray and drab and stunted by comparison. In fact, the only thing that really draws me to the show is Wyatt Russell's new Captain America, and only because something about it reminds me of The Boys. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier themselves? Yawn.

Then you've got Loki, fronted by an actor (Tom Hiddleston) whose status as a treasure is just revealed to me more and more all the time. It's colorful, it's shot in a grand style relying on great digital landscapes, it's got a noodle-twisting narrative, and it's even got the best use of Owen Wilson in at least five years. 

And if you told me five years ago, when I was fully in the grip of my Captain America infatuation, that I'd be this enchanted by a show about people trying to fight a purple smoke monster that guards a gate that takes you to the man who watches over the end of time, I'd have thought you were crazy.

Yet here we are. Not only am I fully on board with all things Thor -- Love & Thunder might be my most anticipated movie of 2022 -- but I can't get to the end of this brief six-episode Captain America spinoff fast enough.

Could it be that the thing that initially made me skeptical of Captain America -- its probable self-seriousness and jingoism -- has finally caught up to it? After all, the anointing of a new Cap in this series feels pretty quaint, reflective of a set of values from the past. (As I've watched it I can't help but think that this show is a bone thrown by Marvel to its more conservative audience, who just can't understand Loki and WandaVision.)

But I don't really think that's it. I think that I finally accept that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is not just a series of stories about small twists on reality, featuring characters who are super in scenarios that are ordinary. Rather, the MCU is a place for people to dream up crazy ideas, based in whole or in part on existing material, and to get those crazy ideas filmed. 

Its only limits are the limits of our imaginations, and after ten years as a fan, I've decided that's how I like it.