Something to watch tonight: Monday 12 February

The Marvels (DaCosta, 2023)

One of the reas­ons why you should hold on to your Disney+ sub­scrip­tion is that the time between their block­buster movies hit­ting cinemas and arriv­ing online is now so short as to be only a minor inconvenience.

I reviewed The Marvels at the pic­tures back in early November and it’s now avail­able to stream for the cost of your monthly Disney+ sub­scrip­tion (which, from memory, is still less than one single IMAX theatre ticket).

We took the oppor­tun­ity to re-watch last night, to see if the film which has been accused of killing the super­hero movie deserves that reputation.

And it clearly doesn’t. Much of the neg­at­ive response to the film is frus­trat­ingly gendered. The film centres three female prot­ag­on­ists and a female vil­lain and just about every HOD on the film is a woman.

Another factor in the film’s rel­at­ive fail­ure with audi­ences may come down to last year’s SAG strike which pre­ven­ted stars from con­trib­ut­ing to the usu­al pub­li­city machine. The usu­al wall-to-wall stu­dio cov­er­age was instead replaced by the online haters and a grow­ing media nar­rat­ive that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is now a vic­tim of its own overreach.

That’s as maybe, but the film is fun and short (com­par­at­ively) and looks great at home, even if the Disney+ policy of show­cas­ing some sequences in IMAX pro­por­tions means a reg­u­lar but baff­ling shift in aspect ratios.

The strengths of The Marvels is in the rela­tion­ship and rap­port between the three ‘mar­vels’ that give the film its title: the ori­gin­al Captain Marvel (Brie Larsen), the most power­ful being in the uni­verse but essen­tially exiled to sort shit out in the out­er reaches of the galaxy; Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), grown-up daugh­ter of Captain Marvel’s best friend; and Kamala Khan (aka Ms. Marvel played with pizza­zz by Iman Vellani), fresh from the Disney+ series of the same name.

…

For all its com­plic­ated ties to oth­er titles that you may or may not have seen or care about, I found very little of The Marvels to be dis­agree­able – the oppos­ite, in fact – largely because the run­ning time doesn’t suc­cumb to the bloat of oth­er films in the fran­chise and because there’s some delight­fully daffy moments that made me – at least – laugh out loud.

Where to watch The Marvels

Everywhere (at least, every­where that has Disney+): Streaming on Disney+

Further reading

It’s Valentine’s Day on Wednesday and RNZ asked me to come up with a list of ten films to watch to cel­eb­rate (or com­mem­or­ate if that’s more your bag).

I tried to pri­or­it­ise pic­tures where the romantic prot­ag­on­ists actu­ally stay togeth­er at the end – a sur­pris­ingly large num­ber of the most romantic films ever made are tra­gic romances – and also tried to avoid being exclus­ively het­ero­sexu­al. How well did I do?

Let me know what you think of my choices in the comments.

Further listening

My weekly chats with Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights are prov­ing to be lots of fun. They’ve doubled my time, too.

Last Friday night at 9.30, I talked with Emile about Force of Nature, the per­form­ances of Nicolas Cage and the new free stream­ing ser­vice, Brollie.