The maligned box office flop The Marvels came home to Disney Plus, with audio description by Laura Post and the team at Deluxe. Picking up where something else left off, which then had this spinoff that featured another character but had one from the movie this is a sequel to, whilst incorporating a brand new character from another TV series… this really doesn’t follow just one thing. This is an amalgamation of what happens when a cinematic universe is taken to the furthest degree.

So, Brie Larson is back as Captain Marvel, who is technically the star of this film. However, Tiana Paris plays Monica Rambo, who we saw in the Captain Marvel film as a young girl. If you aren’t up to date, we learned that the young girl we saw in Captain Marvel grew up to be played by an adult Paris in WandaVision. So, if you feel like you don’t know how Monica Rambo got to where she is in this film, you didn’t watch WandaVision. Then, you have Kamala Khan, aka Miss Marvel, played by Iman Velami, a character that didn’t start off a superhero, but found a bangle, and then became… just watch the series.

I understand why something like this struggled to find an audience. It’s not a film you can just check into, and the supporting characters that jump in had their stories told in Disney Plus TV shows. This isn’t like The Avengers, who had their escapades told on film, but rather you either watched their TV shows or not. A lot of people did watch WandaVision, but not as many watched Miss Marvel, and perhaps that’s what is leading to the lack of easy mass market consumption. It is asking the fans to show up.

As one fan, I enjoyed this for the most part. It isn’t perfect, and despite this being Brie Larson’s franchise, the earnestness of Kamala Khan steals the show. Her whole family from the show is here too, and they provide a certain amount of fun, as dos the requisite Nick Fury interaction. It’s deeply unclear where Fury is in his timeline, as we last saw him making a bold choice at the end of Secret Invasion that makes no sense for the next thing of his to be this.

But, if you can scrape away the clusterfuck that Disney is creating by weaving stories and timelines, and having alternate universes, this is a fun movie. Captain Marvel isn’t my favorite MCU film, and I didn’t feel like this had a dramatic drop in quality. It increases the level of fun, while also really offering one of the worst MCU villains. So while Kamala brings a lot of light and fluff, the villain here is so terrible I can’t even tell you her name or what her purpose was other than to be evil. Talk about a throwaway villain. This is the worst MCu villain since Venom, which is in the broader MCU spectrum. Honestly, Miss Marvel didn’t have a great villain in the series either.

But between a planet full of singing people and cats eating things they don’t normally eat, this was fun. They have a mechanism in this film involving teleportation that makes the audio description one hell of an achievement. The characters are stuck in a weird situation where they switch places with another Marvel if they use their powers. And they do that a lot. The audio description does figure out a way to seamlessly translate these action sequences so we aren’t ever lost, and know who is fighting what when.

There were superhero movies this year that I thought got a bit of a bum wrap, and some that I think were definitely worse than the last film in the series. This one is about on par with how I felt about the first, with the difference being so very sleight. It’s like how I think both Shrek and Shrek 2 are excellent, or how the Guardians trilogy is really hard to rank. There’s a negligible dip, that would have me put this ranked below the first, but only when I have to rank them.

But, if you aren’t watching the Disney Plus shows, you will hate this. It can’t possibly make any sense.

Final Grade: B