Hollywood

The Marvels – Nia DaCosta – Review by Efe Teksoy

November 16, 2023

THE MARVELS, A FEMINIST PARADOX OF SUPERHEROES

Cinema Writer/Film Critic Efe TEKSOY; wrote the fantastic, action and adventure film “THE MARVELS” for America’s Los Angeles-based Internet Newspaper @alaturkanews.

CAPTAIN MARVEL, BOX OFFICE STRUGGLES TO TAKE OFF

The Marvels, directed by Nia DaCosta, it is the sequel to the film Captain Marvel (2019), a continuation of the television miniseries Ms. Marvel (2022). This production, the 33rd movie of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), premiered in Las Vegas on November 7, 2023. It grossed only $47 million in the United States in its first three days of release. It reached $63.3 million internationally, for a worldwide total of $110.3 million. This box office performance had the lowest opening of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. According to Forbes, Disney‘s financial documents, the company’s production of this movie; states that $274.8 million (£221.8 million) has been spent and $55 million (£44.4 million) in subsidies from the UK government has been banked. Since movie theaters receive roughly half the revenue from studios, it would need to earn about $439.6 million at the global box office to break even, the report said. Big competition awaits The Marvels, which entered the box office race with this enormous budget. In the movie; Carol Danvers undertakes the task of saving the universe by joining the forces of Kamala Khan and Monica Rambeau and acting together. Carol Danvers, known as Captain Marvel, takes on the burden of a world out of balance to right the mistakes she made in the past. Danvers’ life is completely changed when she is sent to an abnormal wormhole connected to a “Kree” revolutionary as part of her duty.

Stars; Brie Larson, Teyonah ParrisIman, Iman Vellani, Samuel L. Jackson, Zawe Ashton, Gary Lewis, Park Seo-joon, Zenobia Shroff, Tessa Thompson, Hailee Steinfeld, and Kelsey Grammer.

SPACE ELEVATOR

We see a reference to Alfonso Cuarón‘s film Gravity (2013) in the opening sequence of the film, in which the character Iman Vellani tumbles in space. We also see in the movie that people travel with the Space Elevator (used by Nick Fury). The Space Elevator motif has a very important place in science fiction literature. British inventor and writer Arthur C. Clarke, who was awarded the Order of the British Empire, is remembered as one of the three great masters who left their mark on the “Golden Age” science fiction. In his work titled “The Fountains of Paradise”, Clarke deals with the popular “space elevator” idea of science and develops a project that will revolutionize humanity’s future in space, in this structure built in the 22nd century.

FEMINIST NARRATIVE

We see that there are occasional musical transitions in the story and that the director implements a feminist narrative in the background. Women, the main characters, appear in the story as strong-dominant figures that manifest themselves in the male-dominated ideology. Nia DaCosta became the fourth woman to direct an MCU movie, following directors such as Anna Boden, Cate Shortland, and Chloé Zhao. French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, a feminist thinker, makes a scientific examination of the oppression of women in her 1949 work titled ‘The Second Sex’ (Le Deuxième Sexe), in which she laid the foundations of modern feminism. Beauvoir re-reads contemporary ideas such as existentialism, phenomenology, and structural anthropology, as well as philosophical classics such as Hegel and Marx, on the gender plane and says in The Second Sex: “A dethroned god is not human because: he is fraud itself; The lover has two options: either to prove that he is the exalted king or to confess that he is a snatcher.”. We see that the Marvels in the movie follow the first path mentioned by Beauvoir by not falling down in life but finding a purpose and going to prove that they are the king/queen.

THE MARVELS

In The Marvels, which is part of Phase 5 of the MCU, The young superhero team of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Young Avengers, is also heralded. So just like in the DC Universe (As we saw in The Boys spin-off Gen V), It seems that the Marvel Universe is expanding thanks to the new generation of teen superheroes team and thus the epic adventure will grow even more. These new young teams and groups will play an important role in the Sixth Phase of the MCU. In addition, the post-credits scene of the movie contains some very interesting and beautiful surprises.

EFE TEKSOY