The Marvels arrives with the ingredients of what should have been an important chapter in the MCU. Captain Marvel is one of the most powerful beings in the universe, Kamala Khan is one of Marvel’s most charismatic newer characters and Monica Rambeau has a personal connection to Carol Danvers that should give the story genuine emotional weight. Instead, Nia DaCosta’s film becomes a frustrating tonal mismatch that reduces potentially compelling ideas about guilt, responsibility and redemption to a lightweight adventure that rarely understands the weight of its own story.
Thematically, The Marvels is still very much a Captain Marvel movie despite Marvel’s decision to position Carol, Kamala and Monica as equal leads. The latter two largely exist to support Carol’s journey rather than developing arcs that feel fully independent from her. That isn’t inherently a problem, because Carol has plenty of unresolved material to explore. She carries enormous guilt over the destruction she caused on Hala and has earned the Kree title of the Annihilator, a name that understandably haunts her. The problem is that the movie wants to explore the consequences of that guilt while presenting the story with a relentlessly sunny, comedic tone.
That tonal disconnect undermines nearly everything the film is trying to say. Carol is attempting to atone for devastation that affected an entire civilization, while the movie surrounds her with bright colors, jokes and broad comedy. The story wants to explore healing versus revenge and whether someone can take responsibility for the damage they have caused, but it rarely allows those ideas to breathe. Isolation versus connection is another potentially strong theme, particularly as Carol, Monica and Kamala are brought together, but the emotional material is repeatedly interrupted by comedy that makes the stakes feel less significant than the screenplay insists they are.
Dar-Benn is the biggest casualty of that failure. Zawe Ashton is given very little material to work with because the character is almost entirely defined by her desire to save Hala and her hatred of Carol. She is paper-thin, lacks any real screen presence and never creates the impression that she is capable of overcoming the heroes. A good villain should make the audience understand why the protagonists might lose. Dar-Benn never generates that tension, making her one of the weakest antagonists the MCU has produced.
The problem becomes even more pronounced because the Kree already have an established history in the MCU. Ronan the Accuser was a genocidal fanatic in Guardians of the Galaxy, while Captain Marvel established the Kree as a civilization that slaughtered Skrulls and manipulated Carol’s understanding of her own identity. The MCU has spent years presenting this civilization through its worst elements. Asking the audience to suddenly care deeply about the suffering of the Kree requires considerably more world-building and moral complexity than The Marvels provides. The film wants sympathy for Hala without doing enough to complicate the audience’s understanding of the society itself.
DaCosta’s handling of the action is similarly inconsistent. The opening fight inside Kamala’s home is easily the film’s best sequence because it embraces the characters’ powers in a genuinely creative way. As Carol, Kamala and Monica switch locations while fighting, the scene becomes a clever visual demonstration of how their abilities interact. It also creates legitimate comedy because the characters have to adjust to the constantly changing battlefield. For a brief moment, The Marvels finds the right balance between superhero spectacle and character-driven humor.
Unfortunately, that creativity doesn’t carry over to the rest of the action. The location-swapping gimmick becomes repetitive and the fights increasingly rely on CGI rather than inventive choreography or meaningful geography. Once the novelty wears off, the power-switching mechanic becomes less clever and more exhausting. The action should be an opportunity to demonstrate why these three heroes are so formidable individually and how their powers complement one another. Instead, it frequently feels like the film is repeating its most successful idea because it doesn’t have another one.
The world-building is even more disappointing. The MCU has already established that cosmic adventures can look spectacular through the colorful alien worlds of Guardians of the Galaxy and that superhero stories can create entire civilizations with distinctive histories and cultures through Black Panther. The Marvels rarely approaches that level of imagination. Aladna is the clearest example, a planet where the population communicates through song. Instead of feeling like an interesting expansion of the MCU, the sequence becomes one of the film’s most painful tonal detours. In a movie already struggling to reconcile its ideas with its comedic sensibility, an entire planet built around musical communication pushes the absurdity past the point of charm. It is difficult to imagine the MCU gaining anything by returning there.
Brie Larson remains effective as Carol Danvers, particularly because this version of the character feels more confident while still being emotionally guarded. Carol understands that she cannot remain with Monica forever and that knowledge creates a natural barrier between them. Monica, meanwhile, has grown up without Carol and has become a powerful hero in her own right. There is an interesting conflict buried inside that relationship because both women have changed during their time apart. Unfortunately, Larson and Teyonah Parris never develop the chemistry necessary to make their reconciliation as affecting as the screenplay wants it to be.
Iman Vellani is the film’s brightest spot as Kamala Khan. Her excitement about meeting Captain Marvel is completely believable, and Vellani captures the awkwardness of a teenager meeting the superhero she has idolized. More importantly, Kamala understands the responsibility that comes with her powers even though she is still young. Vellani brings sincerity to that conflict without making Kamala feel overly mature for her age. Her family is also responsible for much of the film’s most effective comedy. Had the humor remained primarily within Kamala’s family and character interactions, rather than being spread so broadly across the entire film, The Marvels would have benefited considerably.
It is frustrating because Captain Marvel herself is not a character who should be difficult to build a compelling story around. Carol has immense power, an unusual history and unresolved relationships throughout the MCU. Larson has also been unfairly targeted since the first film, which received considerably more hostility than it deserved. The Marvels does not prove that Captain Marvel is a bad character. It proves that Marvel still hasn’t figured out how to consistently use her potential. The film gives her a story about guilt and responsibility but doesn’t have the dramatic confidence to fully explore either.
The final moments provide the clearest indication that Marvel understands the value of what comes next, even if the movie itself struggles to justify its own existence. There is a sense that the MCU is trying to use The Marvels as a bridge toward something larger, and that tease is arguably more exciting than much of what came before it. That has become increasingly frustrating with some of the MCU’s weaker installments: Marvel often finds a way to remind audiences why they should care about the future immediately after failing to make the present particularly compelling.
There are MCU films that stumble and still leave behind memorable characters, ideas or moments that justify returning to them. The Marvels struggles to make that case for itself. Its themes are worthwhile, its cast is better than the material and its best action sequence demonstrates that there was a more inventive movie hiding somewhere inside it. But the tonal inconsistency, weak villain, repetitive action, underdeveloped relationships and disappointing world-building ultimately overwhelm those strengths. Captain Marvel deserved a story capable of matching the scale and complexity of her character. Instead, The Marvels feels like a chapter the MCU will have little reason to revisit.