Ms. Marvel (2022) Review

A teenager in Jersey City who writes fan fiction about the Avengers finds a bangle in her grandmother’s things, puts it on, and discovers she can produce solid light. The 1 is about function instead of craft. Nothing here is incompetently made. The direction is lively, the visual style is the most distinctive of any Phase 4 series, and the lead is likeable. What the 1 registers is what happens when you strip the introduction obligation away and ask what the story is about. The answer is a young woman getting powers so that a later film has somebody to put in it.

What frustrates me about Ms. Marvel is how good the buried show is. There’s a lovely series about a Jersey City family in here, and every episode the studio shoves it aside to deliver a character to a film. A lousy show failing on its own terms would annoy me less than this does, and that’s why the number sits so low.

The Visual Grammar Works

Text messages appear on buildings. Doodles animate across walls. A daydream becomes a full illustrated sequence and then collapses back into a bedroom.

It’s the most distinctive-looking project of the phase and the technique is doing something instead of decorating. The animation externalizes an interior life, so the audience is inside the head of somebody who narrates her own existence.

The directing teams, including Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, bring real energy to the Jersey City material, and the first episode has more visual invention in it than most of the films that year.

Iman Vellani is the other thing that works. She plays enthusiasm without becoming grating, which is harder than it sounds, and her fandom is written as specific instead of as a character trait announced once. Vellani was a fan of the comics before she was cast, had no professional credits, and the casting is the kind of decision that usually goes wrong and didn’t. Her enthusiasm reads as belonging to the person instead of to the performance. That isn’t a thing that can be directed into somebody.

Vellani is the best argument for the series, and I’d gladly watch her carry something with a real story. It irks me to see that much charm spent explaining a bangle.

The Family Is the Good Show

Mohan Kapur and Zenobia Shroff play parents who are strict, loving, embarrassing and entirely specific, and every scene in that house is better than the plot around it.

The wedding episode is the series at its best. An extended family, a ceremony, competing opinions, an aunt with an agenda and a teenager who wants to leave, all of it handled with the density of people who have known each other too long.

The wedding episode is the one I’d keep. That aunt with an agenda entertained me more than any villain in the phase, and I resent how quickly the show hurries back to its plot afterward.

Matt Lintz’s Bruno and Yasmeen Fletcher’s Nakia are written with the same care. A friend who’s in love and won’t say it, and a friend running for a mosque board on a platform about the women’s entrance, both given wants unrelated to the superhero plot. The mosque material is the most detailed thing in the phase. A congregation, a leaky roof, a board election and an argument about who the building serves, treated as ordinary life instead of as an establishing shot.

Sheikh Abdullah is the smallest and best example. A religious figure written as a reasonable man with a sense of humor, giving practical advice, who’s neither an obstacle nor a source of wisdom delivered on cue. Almost no American television manages that with any clergy at all.

The Partition Episode

The fifth episode goes to 1947, to a railway station during the partition of India, and follows a family being separated in a crowd. It’s good television and it belongs to a different show. Filmed with weight, specificity and no fantasy business for long stretches, and the sequence of a child being lost and found is the only time the series generates real feeling.

The problem is what it’s attached to. The historical material is framed as the explanation of a bangle, so a real catastrophe that displaced millions becomes backstory for a piece of jewelry. That instrumentalizing is the series’ central failure in its clearest form, and it’s cruel to the history. When the best material exists to explain a plot device, the show has told you what it values. Partition deserved better than to serve as a receipt for a piece of jewelry.

The Plot Is an Arrangement

The antagonists are a group of displaced beings who want to return home, whose motivation changes twice across six episodes, and who are replaced midway by a government agency pursuing the protagonist.

Neither threat accumulates. The Clandestines arrive, state a goal, become hostile, and are dispatched. The agency arrives and escalates, and a community rallying at a school resolves it.

Najma is the clearest waste. A woman who has been separated from her home for seventy-five years, played with real conviction, whose motivation the series restates three times in different terms because it hasn’t decided whether she’s desperate or malevolent. A displaced person who can’t go back is a subject, and the show uses her as an obstacle.

The powers were changed from the source, where the character stretches and reshapes, to hard light constructs. The stated reasons were practical, and the dramatic result is that her ability has no relationship to who she is, where the original had an obvious one about a person trying to fit different shapes. The finale is a school under siege, a speech, and a new name, followed by a scene in which somebody arrives to recruit her. That scene is the purpose, and the six episodes before it are the arrangement around it.

Kamran gets the worst of it, and he’s where I run out of patience. He’s introduced as a romantic possibility, revealed as connected to the antagonists, handed powers he didn’t ask for and then dropped by the plot in the last twenty minutes. That’s what happens when a character exists to move a bangle story forward.

What the Score Measures

A 1 next to a series with this much visible craft in it needs explaining, and the explanation is about why it exists.

Take the introduction obligation away. Remove the requirement that this character appear in a film in November 2023, and ask what story remains. A teenager with a supportive and frustrating family, a crush, a mosque election and a grandmother in Karachi with a history.

That show would be worth watching and this isn’t that show, because every episode has to also deliver a power, a threat, an escalation and an eventual costume. The good material is the residue of a different project running underneath.

The reception made the point in its own way. People widely praised the series for exactly the elements that have nothing to do with the franchise, the family, the neighborhood and the humor, and it had the lowest viewership of any Marvel series to that point. The part people liked wasn’t the part Marvel commissioned it to deliver, and the part Marvel commissioned it to deliver is the only reason that any of the rest of it was ever written, cast, or put in front of a single camera anywhere.

The clearest evidence is the ending. A series that had been about family, faith and a neighborhood concludes with a stranger arriving to say that the protagonist is now part of something larger. That’s an advertisement in the shape of a final scene.

Should you watch Ms. Marvel?

Watch the wedding and the Partition episode, and let the rest go. It’s a 1 from me because a series with this much good material in it was built to hand somebody off to a film, and I can’t get past the waste. The family, the mosque and Vellani deserved a show of their own.

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