While I’ll admit I tend to be really forgiving for superhero films (these are just pure fantastical escapes for my brain), I don’t really get the hate for this film. I thought it was a lot of fun. Goofy? Hell yes! Uneven in places? For sure. But I found the first ‘team up’ movie in a long time to be quite enjoyable.
Iman Vellani was a standout, and Kamala Khan and her family provided a lot of joy in what could have otherwise been a very standard, overly-serious movie. Sure the singing planet was silly AF, and at first I was ready to groan and eyeroll myself out of the theater, it wasn’t that bad, and it also showed, like in GotG movies, the Marvel universe is full of weird and truly alien things. I’ll agree with @MimicJar, I do wish that they had leaned more into it than they did.
The effects were really good to my eye, and the entanglement related stuff was a fun way to add a lot of energy throughout (even if it wasn’t always handled consistently).
The villain was probably the weakest part of the movie; while her motivation was “trying to save my own world”, and thus like many MCU villains has some way of justifying the evil deeds, Dar-Benn felt a bit half baked. That said, it ultimately didn’t matter to me, as I was in it for the three Marvels which made up for what was a somewhat bland villain.
In the end, I found myself laughing and having a genuinely enjoyable time, and am likely to go back a second time. I’ll admit this was not the best MCU film of all time, but for me it was fun. Oh, and the end credit scenes were both pretty rad.
“We use only the finest baby frogs, dew-picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in the finest quality spring water, lightly killed, and sealed in a succulent, Swiss, quintuple-smooth, treble-milk chocolate envelope, and lovingly frosted with glucose.”