The Marvels (2023)

The Marvels arrives as the thirty-third entry in a franchise that no longer requires a formal introduction, and its errand is straightforward: three women with entangled light-based powers must learn to occupy the same fight. Nia DaCosta directs with a breezy hand. The casting is the architecture of the thing, a Black astronaut, a Pakistani-American teenager from Jersey City, a Korean prince who rules a planet where everyone communicates through song. Kamala's family bickers and cooks and worries in the background. None of this is announced. The film simply proceeds as though such an ensemble were ordinary, which is the quiet radicalism of the modern studio blockbuster.

The social ledger here is uneven. Female mentorship and female friendship carry the emotional load, and women save the universe while a woman calls the shots behind the camera. The diversity of the cast is total and largely unremarked, present as texture instead of argument. Race is not the subject. There is no economic critique, no body politics, no neurodivergent interiority, no rewriting of the historical record. The dying Kree homeworld, stripped of air and water and sunlight, supplies a villain's motive and some handsome desolation, nothing more.

Sermonizing is kept to a minimum. This is a breezy team-up picture that wants to be liked and mostly succeeds at being pleasant. It also became the lowest-grossing entry in the franchise, a fact the accountants have absorbed and the cultural historians have not. The residue is a curious artifact, a studio product that made representation structural and then declined to lecture anyone about it. We file it accordingly, with a shrug and a precise notation.