I ended my 2023 review saying the film might have set up something considerably more interesting than itself in its final thirty seconds, and that attaching a promise that large to a film almost nobody watched was a curious decision. Kelsey Grammer is confirmed for Avengers: Doomsday. The scene was real. And it remains genuinely odd that Marvel put the first concrete step toward its biggest crossover in the credits of its lowest-grossing release.
A plan or a punt? I’ve gone back and forth and landed on: a plan, executed in completely the wrong place. The scene is far too specific to be a whim. Monica wakes in a universe where mutants are ordinary, where Beast is a colleague rather than a curiosity, and the film treats the moment as an arrival rather than a joke at anyone’s expense. Somebody knew exactly what that was for. What’s strange is the venue. If you’re announcing that the X-Men exist and that crossing between universes is something characters now simply do, you put it where people will actually see it. Instead it went out attached to a film with the smallest audience the franchise has ever had, which means most of the people who eventually care about it will have encountered it second-hand through somebody else’s clip.
The rewatch makes the chain clearer than it looked at the time, and it’s longer than I realised. Monica gets her powers walking through a barrier in a small town in New Jersey, in a television series about grief. Those powers eventually let her pass through a hole in space that shouldn’t be passable at all. She comes out the other side in a universe with mutants in it. Three years later the actors from that side of the wall are walking into an Avengers film. That’s a genuinely well-built line, spread across a series and a film most people watched separately if they watched them at all, and when December arrives and Fox actors are standing next to MCU ones, part of the reason nobody will need it explained is that this scene quietly did the explaining.
Is it better than its reputation?
Slightly, and only slightly. The reception was broadly fair. I gave it two and a half or three in 2023 and I’d hold that. The problems haven’t moved: the story is thin, Dar-Benn is a poor villain with nothing worth arguing about, and the whole thing moves so fast that nothing gets any room to develop. It’s short, which I still count as a virtue, and it’s short largely because there isn’t very much in it. What it doesn’t deserve is the reputation as an outright disaster. It’s a modest, occasionally charming film with one good idea and a genuinely delightful lead, and the numbers it did got treated as a referendum on the entire franchise rather than as one film underperforming.
Iman Vellani is still the best thing in it and I’d say it more strongly now. Playing the only person in the film who’s excited to be there, without becoming grating, in a first feature, is a real achievement. Every scene with her family still lifts the picture, and watching it again the film is at its most enjoyable whenever it stops being a space adventure and becomes a comedy about superheroes in somebody’s kitchen. If December uses her properly she’ll be one of its highlights, because she’s the rare character who can stand in a room with the originals and read like a person rather than a franchise obligation. The body-switching gimmick has held up too, as the one genuinely inventive thing here: turning a fight into a coordination problem instead of a strength contest is a good idea and nothing since has borrowed it, which is a small shame.
Carol, and the thing nobody has fixed
My view hasn’t shifted and I’ve had three more years to look for evidence that it should. The complaint was always about power. Her abilities come from an Infinity Stone, which ought to put her somewhere near the ceiling of what exists in this universe, and she’s consistently written as somebody who can be knocked through a building and meaningfully slowed down by it. Thanos dismantled the Hulk bare-handed with no stones at all, and adding one only made an already overwhelming being more so. The scale simply doesn’t line up, and nothing since has addressed it. She remains a character the films describe as immensely powerful and depict as merely strong, and if December wants her to matter in a fight with Doom then somebody is finally going to have to show the ceiling.
And Monica is still stranded, as far as anybody has bothered to say. That’s a loose thread with an actual person on the end of it. She’s in another universe, cut off, and the last we saw she was waking up somewhere she doesn’t belong. I said in 2023 that I wasn’t especially engaged by the character and that’s still true, and it doesn’t change the fact that leaving somebody stuck in another reality for three years without a mention is odd. If Doomsday resolves anything from this film it should be that, because she’s the one who made the crossing, and there’s something wrong about a story that uses her passage as a doorway for everybody else and then forgets she went through it first.
Watch the last two minutes. Genuinely, if you’re short of time before December, that’s the part that matters, and it’s the strongest example in this whole rewatch of a scene meaning far more later than it did at the time. Then watch the rest for Kamala, who deserved a better film and will hopefully get a bigger one. Two and a half stands. It’s a small film with a very large footnote, and the footnote is about to become the main text.
That’s the 2023 run finished. Next in the rewatch we reach the point where the crossover stops being a rumour and starts being a thing that has actually happened on screen.
