Critics in the long run can be a slowly forgiving bunch whenever films break old rules, up until a film breaks one of the rules they happen to like. More than any other series since the end of the Rin Tin Tin canon, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s narrative/marketing design has ceased any and all compliance with their longstanding preference for every film to be a self-contained work unto itself, welcoming any and all newcomers and generously bringing all viewers up to speed on preexisting elements without requiring homework or unconditional obsession. I read four different professional reviews of Marvel’s The Marvels before I saw it for myself, and three of them admitted up front they hadn’t kept up with the Disney+ shows that are now integral to the overall continuity. In possibly unrelated news, none of them gave it five stars or an A++.

To be fair, no one — pro, amateur, or non-writing casual — is obligated to love Marvel, embrace superhero films in general, or keep tabs on it all. The cosmopolitan scholars out there who routinely write book-length essays on the works of Abbas Kiarostami or Apichatpong Weerasethakul may not have much recreational use for “popcorn flicks” or TV shows in general. They may, in fact, want to spend their downtime away from screens. For our family, the MCU is one of our bonding rituals, each new film or episode an occasion in which we all put away our respective devices and gather before a single device for an hour or three. Fans who’ve followed along moment-of-release can tell you it isn’t actually that hard to keep up. Sometimes entire months fly by without new MCU stories. It only piles up if you step away for years. With very few exceptions (Anne, like many, still rejects Eternals) we’ve kept up and we helpfully remind each other of characters or plot developments that we’ve forgotten along the way. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

So I can say with at least a modicum of hobbyist authority that the baffling incoherence of The Marvels‘ first half has nothing to do with forgotten lore or skipped content; its structure is shoddy and wobbly entirely on its own terms. In deference to the intent of director/co-writer Nia DaCosta (the fourth Candyman) to bring the runtime under two hours, she and co-writers Megan McDonnell (WandaVision) and Elissa Karasik (Loki) whittled the proceedings down to 105 minutes, making this 33rd MCU entry the shortest one to date, but tried to economize by front-loading it with action and shuffling too much useful exposition and cause-and-effect basics to the middle of the film.

I’d be more irritated if The Marvels also weren’t so delightfully all-out fun, provided your brain has an MST3K-programmed “You Should Really Just Relax” mode, which comes in handy for 1950s B-movies and for occasions like this. If it helps, I can sort through some of that disjointedness without major spoilers. Not all of it, mind you.

Previously on Captain Marvel: Brie Larson was Carol Danvers, Air Force pilot turned alien abductee turned brainwashed soldier turned interstellarly empowered superhero who’s kindasorta Space Wonder Woman minus accessories plus lightshow-y laser-zapping, whose cameos in subsequent films were fine, not embarrassments like Gal Gadot’s two 2023 guest spots. Her We Love the ’90s retro-origin (released during the garment-rending cliffhanger gulf between Infinity War and Endgame) ended with her destroying the Supreme Intelligence, the tyrant A.I. that led the warmongering Kree. Carol took off, her movie ended, and they all lived happily ever after, except for the Kree.

Their next three decades went poorly. Their blue-skinned population fell into civil war (warmongers gonna warmonger) and nearly destroyed their own homeworld of Hala in the process. Without a computer to issue orders or do everything for them, their atmosphere has become nigh unbreathable, their sun verges on burnout, their water supply is depleted and their allegory weighs a ton. A new “Supremor” has taken charge of Hala — the relentlessly furious Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton from Netflix’s Velvet Buzzsaw), who was pulled from some ’90s Silver Surfer comics. Wielding the mighty space hammer formerly owned by Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace’s baddie from the first Guardians of the Galaxy) and a newly unearthed super-zappy relic called a Quantum Band (located through some sort of Space Indiana Jones process that’s 99% left out), Dar-Benn means to save her people by any means necessary.

As it happens, Dar-Benn’s preferred means are evil, and involve extensive use of “Jump Points”, which are artificial wormholes conveniently scattered around the universe so characters can space-travel without needing FTL drives to exist, which would just invite geek physicists to raise their hands and nitpick their every mention. Jump points have been used in previous MCU films, but they weren’t really front-and-center till now. (And, you ask, these jump points were made by whom? SHUT UP, that’s whom.) Dar-Benn plans to use the Quantum Band to harness the jump points, go invade other planets, and steal some new air, new water, and an entire new sun. (I died laughing inside for a few minutes when I remembered one of these was the plot of Spaceballs.) If her plot to save the Kree should happen to perpetuate a genocide or two along the way and make their allegory even heavier, so be it.

As one of the few MCU heroes who’s innately vacuum-capable, Captain Marvel of course will have to save the day, but she’s unexpectedly entangled with two other heroes, both of whom are new to MCU movies. Previously on WandaVision: Monica Rambeau, who was just a wee tyke in Captain Marvel, grew up to be played by Teyonah Parris (the MVP of Netflix’s They Cloned Tyrone). She returned to life after the Blip, grieved the death of her mother Maria, acquired light-based powers during the Scarlet Witch’s magic-sitcom shenanigans, and refused to use a superhero name. (In comics she was the second-ever Captain Marvel, years before the name was passed on to Carol. As a kid I thought she was really cool, but she got beyond short-shrifted.) Monica is now a field scientist working for S.A.B.E.R., Earth’s planetary defense organization that supplanted the now-defunct S.H.I.E.L.D., but she’s never had the chance to go to space yet. She also hasn’t had the chance to reconnect with good ol’ Aunt Carol, who once told her “I’ll be right back!” and then left her behind for the next thirty years, like a deadbeat parent pretending to go out just for cigarettes. Not that she’s bitter. Oh, wait: yeah, she is.

Also on hand is Iman Vellani as TV’s Ms. Marvel (which was also Carol’s original hero-name in comics). Previously on Ms. Marvel: the original Ms. Marvel series by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona was among my favorite Marvel comics of the past ten years, and her refreshingly lighthearted Disney+ series is my favorite MCU show to date. Vellani is Kamala Khan, a Muslim-American teen geek from Jersey City who’s the world’s biggest Captain Marvel superfan. In comics, her powers involve shape-changing and embiggening of body parts to beat up criminals; in the MCU she can make hard-light shapes (cribbed from a B-list hero named Quasar, who in turn was a ripoff of Green Lantern’s power ring) and she has a mysterious armband bequeathed to her by her grandma, which gives her some upgrades and looks an awful lot like Dar-Benn’s. In comics she was originally an Inhuman, but we don’t talk about Inhumans anymore after that terrible ABC series, so in the MCU she’s a mutant, even though we also don’t talk about mutants because the X-Men aren’t around yet, plus recently in the comics she was retconned as both a mutant and an Inhuman, which should be canonically impossible yet totally is now because SHUT UP that’s why.

Kamala is still relatively new to superheroism, definitely hasn’t traveled in space yet, and has even more definitely never met any of her idols. Kamala’s wide-eyed hero worship, infinite adorkability, and nimble comic timing are incontrovertibly the best part of The Marvels. (On that point, those four pro-critic reviews I mentioned above unanimously agreed.) No matter how mildly intense, jump-cuttingly confusing, or tonally fractured the film gets, Vellani is a walking, chattering, acrobatically inclined font of optimistic enthusiasm who brings comic relief and balance to Marvel’s other straight-faced, sometimes too-dour stars.

The ladies don’t really plan their team-up: their light-based powers get connected and snarled through a staggering coincidence that’s best not contemplated too hard as the resulting complication makes them switch places whenever two or all of them use their powers at the same time, no matter how many parsecs apart they are. Sometimes this is fun, in the initial moments of hilarious confusion, the Act Two training montage in which they try to make the liability work for them, and in the mostly coordinated final boss-battle. Sometimes if you pay too much attention, it’s wildly inconsistent, happening only when the writers decide it should and dormant when it would muddle matters into an even bigger mess. (Repeat after Mike Nelson, if you can: You Should Really Just Relax.)

Our Heroes are also assisted by good ol’ Nick Fury, as Samuel L. Jackson managed to escape Secret Invasion, the worst show I’ve slogged through on any streaming service since Iron Fist, even accounting for non-superhero works. (It’s probable Inhumans was actually The Worst, but I abandoned that slog ninety minutes in.) Fury and S.A.B.E.R. do what they can as the film’s de facto home base while Dar-Benn’s army planet-jumps to each set piece. For new atmosphere they jump to a Skrull refugee stronghold and flip on their Mega-Maid air-suck device, distracting the audience from the question of why, in all the Secret Invasion bellyaching about Skrull refugees, Talos’ faction was allowed to languish in hiding on Earth rather than simply be sent here, which thereby would’ve negated Secret Invasion‘s entire existence. (For that answer we turn now to our man-on-the-street correspondent, SHUT UP.) For water the Kree storm a planet where everyone communicates only through singing and dancing, which is a perfect setting for Ms. Marvel to be Ms. Marvel and remind us of the intermittently musical goodness of Ms. Marvel while her teammates are invited to relax like TV’s Ms. Marvel as well, which makes a nice coffee break for Larson and Parris and lets us decide if they’d be good fits to join the cast of Ms. Marvel season 3. As for Part 3 of Dar-Benn’s 3-point master plan…I’ll give you zero guesses where they go try stealing a sun.

I wouldn’t feel so obligated to recap at such maddening lengths except (a) I do that sometimes and (b) the film is not edited for maximum comprehensibility. Scenes are slashed down to the shortest possible length, then stapled onto other scenes in seemingly random order, with no segues to make sense as we’re hurtled from one place to the next. One minute there’s a huge fight scene aboard the Kree warship; then I blinked and everyone’s warped down to Skrulltown for some wanton destruction. The editors frantically toggle between S.A.B.E.R. HQ, Humble Casa Khan, and wherever Carol and/or Monica are in space at any given second, all but refusing to let us breathe or actually track the flow of events. “Flow” is the wrong word — more like a leaking dike with streams springing from every crack, leaving the audience to catch what they can between their cupped fingers. In a story that also has emotional conflicts in dire need of more room for dwelling (Monica getting real about the wounds caused by Carol’s absence; poor Kamala trying to wrap her head around the trauma of helplessly witnessing mass murder), it’s tough to empathize with what should be Our Heroes’ most meaningful scenes while we’re sore from edit-whiplash.

The Marvels could do better with a second showing, because the first one is a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces were scattered across four rooms’ worth of shag carpet. And yet…for fans of TV’s Ms. Marvel, whether previously or just now, if you keep your focus on her and pretend everything else that you’re ignoring somehow makes sense, think of The Marvels as simply a two-episode second season of Ms. Marvel. That way it’s a more essential MCU experience and worth any endearment you might hold for what used to make superheroes tick back in The Good Ol’ Days (i.e., when I was 12). Her portions of this film are consistent with her show and remind me of DC’s criminally overlooked Blue Beetle in good ways. If you refuse to see them in theaters because you hate cinematic happiness, at least check out both films when they get to Disney+ and Max respectively and have yourself a rollicking young-hero double-feature. That’s assuming you subscribe to either or both, and assuming you aren’t a critic who brags about not owning a TV all over your social media by typing into the streaming-capable device you’re holding right there in your hands.

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Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Hey, Ms. Marvel fans! Some of the fam are here, too! They invited Kamala’s mom (Zenobia Shroff from The Big Sick and Pixar’s Soul), dad (Mohan Kapur, the voice of Dr. Strange in Hindi dubs), and brother Aamir (Saagar Shaikh), who already knew about Kamala’s double life and who are waaay in over their heads when the Kree melees arrive in their tiny living room. They stick around through the whole film, even tagging along with Nick Fury to S.A.B.E.R. HQ, learning classified information and ending up in harm’s way more than once. They’re all lovely and funny, Shroff in particular, but as to why Fury allows such civilians around for any of this, please have this S.A.B.E.R. business card that says SHUT UP. (Sadly M.I.A. are her BFF Bruno and all their other friends, which is a shame — more casualties of the insistence on such a lean runtime.)

Lashana Lynch returns from Captain Marvel as Maria Rambeau in flashback. The S.A.B.E.R. staff includes Leila Farzad from the Black Mirror episode “Joan Is Awful”. Other Kree include Daniel Ings from Black Mirror‘s “Smithereens”, who was Prince Phillp’s secretary in the first two seasons of The Crown. Park Seo-joon (who appeared briefly in Parasite as a friend of the son’s) is the bilingual leader of Planet Musical.

Before the end credits, we also get two (!!) special cameos by MCU heroes who accepted invitations to this very special all-female Marvel-hero shindig.

How about those end credits? To answer the burning question that MCC is always happy to verify: yes, there is indeed a scene during The Marvels‘ end credits. For those who tuned out prematurely and really want to know, and didn’t already click elsewhere…

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[…insert space for courtesy spoiler alert in case anyone needs to abandon ship…]

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…after using the joint power-boosts from Captain Marvel and Ms. Marvel to save our sun and restitch the ruptured fabric of the MCU’s primary universe, Monica Rambeau (a.k.a. Professor Marvel as far as I’m concerned unless she picks a name ASAP) wakes up not dead after all, in a strange hospital bed in an alternate reality. Two superhumans are by her bedside. One is an alt-timeline version of her mom Maria, who never had a daughter, instead got superpowers, and goes by codename Binary, which was also Carol’s second hero-name in comics.

The other is a face and voice familiar to movie fans: TV’s Dr. Frasier Crane himself, Kelsey Grammer reprising his role as Hank McCoy, a.k.a. the Beast from 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand. That was a terrible film, but his Beast wasn’t among its sins. This time the blue fur is all CGI and looks remarkably better than his practical fur suit. The main takeaway here is THE X-MEN HAVE ARRIVED IN THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE! Well, beyond the first baby step they took in Ms. Marvel when they labeled Kamala a mutant. But now they’re REALLY HERE FOR REAL. Except they have their own reality, which we could call Earth-X if that weren’t already used at Marvel and at DC Comics.

Anyway: To be continued, presumably!

And to finish our usual confirmations: no, there’s no scene after The Marvels‘ end credits, but if you stick around to the very last second, the Marvel Studios logo is accompanied by the sound of flerkens barfing. Did I forget to mention the flerkens? Plural?

(I nearly titled this entry “Yes, There’s a Scene During The Marvels End Credits and Some Vomiting After Them”, but I can see the wrong crowds taking petty junior-high-bully glee from misinterpreting that, so I’m burying the joke here instead.)