Film / The Marvels (2023)

Spoilers for all Marvel Cinematic Universe works preceding this one will be left unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

Teaming up changes e̶v̶e̶r̶y̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ everyone.

Monica: She's entangled our light-based powers. So, we switch places whenever we use them.
Fury: Strong theory.

The Marvels is a 2023 superhero film and the third film and fifth installment of Phase Five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, acting as a sequel to Captain Marvel while also serving as a follow-up to events in WandaVision, Ms. Marvel, and Secret Invasion. The film is directed by Nia DaCosta.

Leading on from The Stinger of Ms. Marvel, the film sees Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), a.k.a. Captain Marvel, teaming up with her old friend, the recently empowered Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), and the still-rookie superheroine and super-fan Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), a.k.a. Ms. Marvel, when a mysterious cosmic event entangles the three, causing them to switch places whenever they use their powers. Together, the three embark on a space-faring adventure to find out what caused their entanglement and restore their abilities to “normal”.

Samuel L. Jackson returns as Nick Fury, while Saagar Shaikh, Zenobia Shroff, and Mohan Kapur return as Kamala's family. Zawe Ashton portrays Kree Accuser Dar-Benn and Park Seo Joon plays Prince Yan of Aladna.

The Marvels was released in theatres November 10, 2023. Not to be confused with the comic book The Marvels, which is more focused on the broader Marvel Universe in general.

Previews: Teaser Trailer, Official Trailer, Final Trailer

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The Marvels provides examples of:

Tropes A to E

• Action Survivor: The Khan family manages to put up a decent showing against the Kree soldiers who unexpectedly bust into their home.
• An Aesop: By getting to know Carol better, Kamala learns that the heroes she idolizes are only human and capable of messing up, just like everyone else.
• Aesop Amnesia: Monica has learned nothing from her experiences during WandaVision — specifically to not touch dangerous, unknown energy barriers. Carol is likewise guilty of it, leading to this exchange:
  Carol: The Kree jury-rigged a wormhole on MB-418.
  Fury: You mean, like a jump point?
  Carol: I don't know! But, I touched it, and then—
  Fury: Why'd you do that?
  Carol: Because it was glowing and mysterious!
  Fury: Okay, new rule: No more touching shit! Especially glowing, mysterious shit.
• All Planets Are Earthlike: Dar-Benn has been targeting several planets with biomes comparable to Hala and Earth, her final target.
• Ambiguous Situation: Did Monica land in a universe containing Earth-10005, or some yet-to-be-numbered Earth in a new universe? Kelsey Grammer was voicing Beast, but there was never any mention in the original X-Men films of any other heroes, meaning Binary is definitely out of place in that instance.
• Apologetic Attacker: Kamala apologizes to some S.A.B.E.R. operators after she projects a Hard Light barrier to prevent them from escaping being swallowed by flerkens.
• Arc Welding:
  • The film not only continues Carol Danvers and Nick Fury's Infinity Saga-era storylines (and, in the latter's case, the aftermath of Secret Invasion), but it also includes Monica and Kamala's story threads from WandaVision and Ms. Marvel. The latter follows up on many of the unanswered questions about Kamala's bangle in particular, with the villain having the other missing one. The final scene likewise merges threads from Hawkeye, picking up Kate Bishop's storyline in the wake of her and Clint Barton's team-up.
  • The Guardians of the Galaxy Trilogy also gets tied in, as the origin of the Jump Point Network (which was first introduced in Guardians Vol. 2) is finally revealed and is integral to the narrative.
• Ascended Fangirl: Kamala spends much of the first trailer squeeing over the fact that she's meeting the likes of Nick Fury and her idol Carol Danvers. Neither of them exactly share the same sentiment or know how to deal with her.
• The Baby of the Bunch: Out of the three eponymous "Marvels", teenage Kamala is the youngest of the group, compared to Monica (who's in her late thirties) and Carol (who's in her early sixties). Kamala's youth is emphasized a lot in the film, since she spends a good chunk of the movie either gushing about how cool it is to be meeting her heroes, or panicking about what she's just been thrust into. However, she's still shown to be a competent and adaptable fighter, like her teammates.
• Bait-and-Switch: The Stinger has Monica meet up with a woman who she thinks is her mother, only to find out that she's actually a superheroine named Binary. Oh, and the doctor taking care of her is Beast!
• Big "OMG!": Kamala screams this multiple times when she accidentally teleports into Monica's space suit. She later shrieks one of these again after watching Goose devour two mooks.
• Bittersweet Ending: Carol, Monica, and Kamala put a stop to Dar-Benn's campaign. Carol is able revive Hala's dying sun to help restore the planet, allowing her to start atoning for her mistake, and decides to finally return to Earth. Meanwhile, Kamala is inspired to start a new superhero team with Kate Bishop and possibly Cassie Lang. However, Monica is trapped in another universe, but she meets an alternate version of her mother, who is allies with the X-Men, and Carol and Kamala are both hopeful that Monica will find a way back.
• Book on the Head: Carol and Kamala both do this while practicing with their entangled powers.
• Broken Pedestal: Kamala is deeply hurt when Carol stops her from trying to save more Skrulls on the dying planet, saying they have to save whom they can and leave the rest. It's heavily downplayed, though, because Carol apologizes for it soon after, and it becomes a Rebuilt Pedestal pretty quickly. While their adventure together allows Kamala to see her idol as a real, flawed person instead of a larger-than-life celebrity (which she herself acknowledges), by the end, she still admires and respects Captain Marvel as much as ever.
• The Butcher: The Kree who encounter Carol throughout the film universally refer to her as "The Annihilator", because, since she destroyed the Supreme Intelligence, they blame her for all the devastation that the resulting Kree Civil War wrought on their Empire and for Hala becoming nearly uninhabitable.
• Call-Back:
  • Carol repurposed the Skrull device used to replay her memories, and using it with Monica and Kamala gives us random scenes from WandaVision and Ms. Marvel.
  • The hyperspace jump network introduced in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 plays an important role here.
  • Emperor Drogge's colony of Skrull refugees, first mentioned in passing in Secret Invasion is shown in full in this movie.
• The Cameo: Naturally.
  • Valkyrie shows up at one point to take some Skrull refugees to New Asgard.
  • Kate Bishop shows up in the final scene where Kamala tries to recruit her into the "Young Avengers".
  • Beast, once again played by Kelsey Grammer, greets Monica after she wakes up.
• Cats Love Laser Pointers: Showing another thing that flerkens have in common with cats, Carol is seen entertaining Goose with a green laser pointer in her spaceship.
• Chekhov's Hobby: Kamala's love of watching Bollywood movies helps her blend in easily on the musical planet Aladna.
• Chekhov's Skill: Goose swallows two Kree soldiers and then regurgitates them without their being harmed. Later, Fury has a litter of Flerkittens swallow the satellite's crew in order to evacuate them, as he can fit all of the Flerkittens but not all of the crew onto the last remaining escape pod and shuttle.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Only three major characters from Ms. Marvel besides Kamala herself show up in this movie: her parents and brother Aamir. Aamir's wife Tyesha doesn't show up, and as for Kamala's close friends, Nakia is briefly mentioned but Bruno is not alluded to.
• Clean, Pretty Childbirth: We see one of Goose's flerkittens hatch. It comes out rather clean-looking and about the size of a two-month-old Earth kitten.
• Cloth Fu: Kamala is given a scarf with her new costume on Aladna and is instructed to use it in battle. She does so to great effect.
• Comic-Book Movies Don't Use Codenames: Lampshaded and played for laughs with Monica, who notes that she simply goes by "Captain Rambeau", not by Photon or any other special codename. Naturally, Kamala isn't willing to accept this, and she begins trying to workshop other names that Monica can use, all of which she rejects. While "Spectrum" is among the names Kamala pitches for her, it's not given any significant weight over the other more jokey suggestions, and "Photon" never gets mentioned at all. Oddly, the Marvel Legends figure of Monica calls her "Marvel's Photon" (the line uses "Marvel's" as a clarifier whenever a name is too generic to be trademarked).
• Company Cross References: Kamala saying "We have our heading." before she, Carol, and Monica go after Dar-Benn.
• Continuity Nod:
  • After being called by Fury, Carol suggests to Goose that they should Send it to Voicemail.
  • After changing out of her spacesuit while on Carol's ship, Monica puts on Carol's Nine Inch Nails T-shirt from the first movie.
  • When Carol questions how she got her powers, Monica tells her that she got them by passing through a hex created by a witch.
  • Valkyrie notes that she has experience with "unexpected teamups".
  • When an escape pod lands in Battery Park, it passes the Statue of Liberty, which is still the colour of unoxidized copper from when it was refurbished in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
  • The home in Louisiana where Carol moves into at the end is actually the Rambeaus' original home.
  • When Kamala meets Kate Bishop in the latter's home, Kate is seen wearing the purple suit she first used in Hawkeye. We also see Lucky the Pizza Dog. Kamala also begins their discussion by calling Kate by her full name, which was also what Yelena did when she met her in similar circumstances. Kamala also reuses some of Wong's lines from the stinger of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. She also adapts Nick Fury's "Part of a bigger universe" speech from when he meets Tony Stark in the stinger of Iron Man.
  • The sound of a Flerken regurgitating can be heard near the end of the credits, while the second stinger of the first movie showed Goose regurgitating the Tesseract.
  • Goose's Establishing Character Moment in the first trailer has her eating a bunch of Kree soldiers with her tentacles, just like in the first film. Unlike Fury, Maria, and Carol, however, Kamala's reaction is a little less passive.
• Continuity Snarl: Towards Secret Invasion. The movie is set after it, but cheerfully disregards or outright contradicts pretty much all of that series' plot points. In particular: There's an established Skrull colony on another planet, making the plot point of "The Skrulls are disenchanted with Fury and Captain Marvel for not finding them another planet to colonize" nonsensical. Fury's wife, who in the series specifically followed him into space in order to help with the peace talks, isn't mentioned or seen on either S.A.B.E.R. or the Skrull colony. G'iah, who has Captain Marvel's powers amongst others, isn't mentioned in the movie and doesn't become entangled with the others. Valkyrie shows up in the movie to take the Skrulls to safety on Earth, even though by the end of the series Earth should no longer have been safe for either Skrulls or Asgardians. The Skrulls in the movie are also characterized the way they were in Captain Marvel, as noble and blameless refugees, disregarding their characterization from the series. Most likely this was caused by schedule changes that couldn't be properly fixed by reshoots, since The Marvels was originally supposed to release before Secret Invasion.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Had Dar-Benn actually went to the planets she invaded on genuine goodwill missions, instead of just invading and stealing their natural resources, it is very possible they would've willingly found a solution to the Kree's crisis.
  • Carol could also apparently have reignited Hala's sun at any time.
• Cuteness Proximity: Just like he cooed over Goose in the previous film, tough, stoic, badass Nick Fury absolutely melts when he sees the first newborn Flerkitten.
• Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: The reason Carol never visited Monica after leaving Earth was that she destroyed the Supreme Intelligence, leaving a power vacuum and starting a civil war that destroyed the Kree homeworld. She spent her years trying to fix the fallout of her mistakes and never returned home because she was ashamed of what she'd done.
• Denser and Wackier: As a sequel to Captain Marvel. The 2019 film is Carol Danvers' origin story with a largely serious sci-fi tone, and Goose the Flerken being the only bizarre element. This sequel features three protagonists exchanging commentary on their different powersets, Kamala and her family in some Fish out of Water moments, a world where the people communicate via singing and dancing, with Carol joining in the song/dance too, and finally dozens of Flerkens hatching from eggs laid by Goose and using their Hammerspace abilities to save people.
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • A meta example. Due to Marvel's way of promoting their films, the film is typically promoted as "Marvel Studios' The Marvels''.
  • One of the items in Kamala's shrine to Carol Danvers is fan art of the two of them hugging each other, to which there's a sign that reads "BFF 4 EVA" which would read as "Best friends forever forever".
• Didn't Think This Through: As she pledged to Yon-Rogg in the climax of the first film, Carol did indeed come gunning for the Supreme Intelligence and put an end to its warmongering and lies. However, Carol didn't stop to consider that as bad as the Supreme Intelligence was, its leadership had also guided the Kree's military and politics for millennia; their entire civilization was dependent upon the AI just to function. What happens if you suddenly and violently remove that from the equation, and without having any kind of plan for the ensuing power vacuum? So in short order, the Kree splintered into a decades-long civil war that devastated Hala— and has left Carol wracked with guilt at the catastrophe that her good intentions and self-righteousness unleashed.
• Die or Fly: Thanks to the Swap Teleportation, Kamala and Carol switch places while the latter is several hundred feet in the air. Fury has to encourage Monica to figure out how to fly before Kamala hits the ground. Though she gets the flying part down, she can't turn off her intangibility while using it, forcing Kamala to improvise by triggering another swap with Carol, who can survive the fall.
• Distant Sequel: The previous Captain Marvel movie was a Period Piece that primarily took place in 1995, while this movie takes place immediately after Ms. Marvel (which itself took place after WandaVision), giving the two movies an in-universe gap of around 30 years. In that time, Monica has grown up and become an agent for S.A.B.E.R. (moving on from S.W.O.R.D., who she worked for in WandaVision)
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • In a cautionary tale regarding the dangers of regime change, Carol ends the rule of the Supreme Intelligence over the Kree without any regard for how it might affect them, causing their society to subsequently fall into chaos and civil war.
  • Actual species aside, cats returning home pregnant with kittens is a problem that cat owners face.
• Don't Touch It, You Idiot!: Fury is incredulous that Carol and Monica chose to touch the glowy, mysterious purple wall that is currently causing them to switch places with each other and Kamala, and sets a new rule in place to not touch any "glowy, mysterious shit" in the future.
• Energy Absorption: Dar-Benn's bangle is able to absorb any energy that comes into contact with it, allowing her to negate the otherwise overwhelming advantage of Carol's powers.
• Enemy Civil War: The Kree ended up in one in the interim since the first film (thanks to Carol killing the Supreme Intelligence and throwing Hala's government into chaos).
• Explosive Breeder: Goose lays more than two dozen eggs throughout the space station. The litter fills up the floors and walls of an escape pod, and there's still some left over to fit in a second pod with Fury and the Khans.

Tropes F to O

• Failed a Spot Check: When Monica and Kamala find themselves stuck in the Kree ship after a another unexpected switch, none of the Kree realise that Kamala's bangle is identical to the one they are after, even with their own bangle being propped in the same room. This leaves Kamala the time to hide it under her sleeve.
• Failed Attempt at Drama: Kamala attempts to recreate The Stinger from the original Iron Man when recruiting Kate Bishop for the "Young Avengers". Thanks to her youth and awkwardness, it fails miserably.
• Fanfic Fuel: In-Universe. Finding out that Carol married the prince of a planet that communicates entirely in song gives Kamala a lot of ideas for her Captain Marvel fan fiction.
• Fantastic Racism: The Kree still despise the Skrulls as much as they did during the first film (if not more thanks to Carol's history with them in the decades since). Dar-Benn chooses to target their new colony just to be petty.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Kamala's mother takes notice of the fact that Goose seems to have gained a lot of weight since we last saw her, and is worried that Fury may have been overfeeding her. As it turns out, there's a very good reason why Goose has gotten so fat, but it's not because of her diet... it's because she's pregnant.
  • In a flashback, Carol tells Maria that it should've been her who got the superpowers, and if the "stupid race" to the hangar had gone the other way, it would've been. In the alternate universe that Monica goes to, Maria does have powers, but there's no indication of Carol.
• Freudian Trio:
  • Id: Kamala Khan, the youngest and most prone to impulsive decisions to impress the other two, Nick Fury, etc.
  • Superego: Monica, the middle, has in-depth knowledge of topics such as quantum physics.
  • Ego: Carol, the oldest and most experienced of the three.
• Funny Background Event: After the shuttle with Fury and the Khans has safely landed on Earth, in the background you can see the Flerkittens spitting out the devoured scientists.
• Getting Eaten Is Harmless: Goose swallows a pair of Kree in front of Kamala, only to then vomit them back up unharmed in the Khans' living room after the Swap Teleportation brings them back to Earth. Later, the Marvels, Fury and the Khans get all of the scientists out of the S.A.B.E.R. base after its Escape Pods are damaged by having all of the flerken kitties eat them and then regurgitate them once they're back on Earth. Justified, as the Flerkens are aliens and, well, who's to say how their biology works, exactly?
• Group Hug: After learning that Maria Rambeau died while Monica was Snapped, Kamala immediately gives Monica a hug and makes Carol join in.
• Hammerspace: The stomach of a Flerken. Shown at the end of the first movie when Goose regurgitated the Tesseract (rather than digesting it), it's shown in this film that even a newborn Flerken kitten has the ability to "store" an adult-size humanoid inside them, with no change to their own shape and size, and later cough them up full-size and unharmed.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In the climax, Monica strands herself on the other side of Dar-Benn's Jump Point breach in order to seal it from the other side.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: After taking Kamala's bangle and using it in conjunction with her own, Dar-Benn is promptly disintegrated by the released energies.
• It's Personal: Zigzagged with Dar-Benn and her grudge against Carol. On the one hand, Dar-Benn's never actually met Carol before this movie (nor does she have any familial or personal connections to Yon-Rogg, Minn-Erva, the rest of Starforce, Ronan, or even Mar-Vell). On the other hand, her enmity towards Carol is very personal, as she blames Captain Marvel for killing the Supreme Intelligence decades ago and setting off a chain of events that plunged the Kree Empire into a civil war and devastated Hala.
• Internal Homage:
  • In the trailer, Dar-Benn utters, "You took everything from me". This is the same thing that a vengeful Wanda Maximoff said to Thanos before she unleashed a rather vicious beatdown upon him in Avengers: Endgame.
  • In the last scene of the film, Kamala recreates The Stinger from the original Iron Man, except with herself as Nick Fury and Kate Bishop as Tony Stark.
• Inertia Is a Cruel Mistress: Part of the problem with the Swap Teleportation is that the characters retain their momentum through the swaps. Carol is violently flung into Kamala's closet just to start, and it makes their tag-team combat a little difficult because they have to account for each other's movement when swapping.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Had Dar-Benn simply conceded after being impaled by debris and agreeing to let Carol restore Hala’s sun, she would have probably lived to see her home restored. But after the debris is removed, she attacks Kamala and steals her bangle to open the last jump point, and the energy emitted by both bangles destroys her.
• Legendary in the Sequel: A variation — and played for drama — due to the decades-long interim between The Marvels and the first film. Carol has gone from a member of Yon-Rogg's Starforce (who wasn't known outside of the Kree military and government spheres) to the most infamous and hated non-Kree in the entire Empire. This is because Carol destroyed the Supreme Intelligence, setting off a chain of events that plunged the Empire into a decades-long civil war and devastated Hala.
• Light 'em Up: All three protagonists have light-based powers, as explained by Monica in the second trailer. Carol can absorb light and fire it back out, Monica can see and become light, while Kamala can create Hard Light constructs. It's the reason their powers are able to be entangled.
• Logo Joke:
  • In the teaser trailer, the words in the Marvel Studios logo in the trailer are initially reversed before being switched back to normal.
  • The official trailer has the second "S" on Studios turn into Ms. Marvel's emblem.
• Lucky Charms Title: The "A" in the title incorporates Monica's logo, while the "S" is Kamala's.
• Ludicrous Precision: Carol knows offhand that Aladna's oceans cover 99.63% of the planet. Monica immediately realizes that Carol's been there before.
• Male Gaze: Countless moments where the camera is focused on either Carol's or Monica's butt, along with several shots of Carol in a tight white halter-top t-shirt. Kamala's more modest style of dressing (along with her 'covers everything but her face and hands' costume) prevents the same being done to her; the only time she shows any skin is when her midriff is briefly exposed while she's dancing on Aladna.
• Mama Bear: After being convinced that Kamala is needed to resolve the crisis, Mrs. Khan tells Kamala to let Monica know that she will kill her if anything happens to her daughter.
• Medium-Shift Gag: Much like on the TV series, Kamala's fan-fiction is done in the style of traditional hand-drawn animation.
• Misplaced Retribution: The Kree place the whole of the blame for the collapse of their empire and Hala becoming a dying planet entirely on Carol for killing the Supreme Intelligence, conveniently ignoring the fact that all of the actual damage was caused by the Kree themselves when they fought each other in a decades long civil war.
• Musical Episode: On Aladna, everyone acts as if they're in a big flashy musical.
• Musical World Hypotheses: Aladna is an example of Flavor 1; song is the "language" of its people, with musical accompaniment and costume changes with no explanation. At first Carol goes along with the singing to confer with the Prince before dropping it and speaking to him plainly about why they came, which he understands, being "bilingual".
• My God, What Have I Done?: Carol puts up a stoic front, but she is horrified by her role in the fall of Hala, as her destroying the Supreme Intelligence led to the Kree Civil War. She has remained in space trying to right wrongs ever since out of guilt.
• Mythology Gag:
  • "Captain Marvel swaps places with a teenager via a bangle" is a bit of a riff on the comic books' Captain Mar-Vell, Rick Jones, and the Nega-Bands. The idea's also been used in Carol's own comics, but was only introduced shortly before the film released. The word "entanglement" usually refers to quantum physics, and Marvel Comics also has a more powerful version of the Nega-Bands called the Quantum Bands, which are also associated with light powers. The film confirms that Kamala's bangle is one of the Quantum Bands, and Dar-Benn finds the other one in the opening scene.
  • The costume for Monica on Aladna comes with draping sleeves like she had in her initial comics outfit before she rips them off for being impractical.
  • John Ottman's theme from X2: X-Men United, X-Men: Days of Future Past & X-Men: Apocalypse gets a Musical Nod in The Stinger, when it's revealed that Monica is stuck in a universe inhabited by X-Men.
  • Kamala keeps trying to come up with codenames for Monica Rambeau (two of which are Pulsar and Spectrum, both of which she had for a while in the comics universe). In the comics, Monica is notorious for constantly changing codenames, sometimes because somebody else steals, sometimes for other reasons, but they never stick for long.
  • In The Stinger, Alt-Maria has the codename Binary, which was Carol's codename for a while in the comics. When she's shown in a full-length shot, she's also wearing Binary's red-on-white costume.
  • During Dar-Benn's flashback, the Supreme Intelligence is briefly shown in its comic-accurate appearance as a massive inhuman head before Carol destroys it.
  • The Multiverse Saga-era Kree regard Carol as, for all intents, their equivalent of Osama bin Laden due to Carol killing the Supreme Intelligence in the interim since the first Captain Marvel. This is, ironically, not dissimilar to the infamous reputation Reed Richards enjoys among the Skrulls in the comics thanks to the Fantastic Four's longtime clashes with the Skrull Empire.
  • Monica initially calls Dar-Benn's Accuser weapon a "hammer", before Carol corrects her by saying it's "the Universal Weapon". Kamala says she expected something cooler like "the Cosmi-Rod." In the comics, the terms are both used for the Accusers weapons.
• Namedar: The people of Aladna somehow know Kamala's team name, "The Marvels", which baffles Monica.
• Never Got to Say Goodbye: Maria Rambeau passed away during the "Blip". Since Monica was one of those who had been snapped away, she never got to see her mother in her final hours. It's also left ambiguous if Carol was there when Maria died, though her memories show she was on Earth sometime prior, because Maria revealed her cancer had recurred.
• Never My Fault: The Kree place the entire blame for the state of their homeworld and civilization squarely on Carol, even though, by their own telling of the events, all she did to them was kill the Supreme Intelligence. The notion that they might bear some of the responsibility for fighting each other for 30 years in a civil war and destroying their own world doesn't appear to even cross their minds. When Dar-Benn destroys a Skrull refugee planet, she declares that this is their own fault for bringing "the Annihilator" to the planet, claiming that this shows how the Skrulls regard the Kree as vermin to be exterminated, ignoring how the Kree treated the Skrulls that way for decades (and Carol was only there by chance anyway, they didn't ask her to come). The craft that Carol attacks is also a warship, and Dar-Benn declares her intent to strip the planet's atmosphere before she even knows Carol is there— so Dar-Benn was clearly planning for violence from the start.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The trailer implies that Dar-Benn, for whatever reason, intentionally entangles the powers of Carol, Monica, and Kamala. In the film itself, their powers become entangled as an unintended consequence of Dar-Benn using the other bangle to open wormholes and both Carol and Monica touching glowing mysterious walls because they're there.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Carol killing the Supreme Intelligence plunged the Kree Empire into a 30-year civil war that nearly destroyed their civilization and left their homeworld of Hala a dying planet. The guilt she feels over this and her inability to fix the problem is one of the reasons Carol hasn't returned to Earth.
• Not in the Face!: Nick Fury has a bit of a scare while holding a newborn flerken and it suddenly whips out the tentacles, in a Continuity Nod to how he lost his eye in Captain Marvel.
  Fury: Oh no, not my good eye!
• Oh, No... Not Again!: In the trailer, Carol's reaction to having switched into Kamala's house a second time is a frustrated "Not again!" before noticing Fury, Rambeau, and the Khans.
• Older Than They Look:
  • Although about 30 years have passed since the events of the first Captain Marvel, Carol still doesn't look any older.
  • Kamala's father chats up a member of S.A.B.E.R. about retirement plans and asks him how old he is. Despite looking no more than middle-aged, the man replies that he's 306, taking Mr. Khan quite aback.
  • When Kamala asks Kate Bishop if she thinks she's "the only kid superhero in the world", Kate replies that she's actually 23.
• Only One Finds It Fun: When the Marvels arrive on Aladna, Kamala is the only one to enjoy the musical welcome.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: After defeating Dar-Benn and witnessing Monica vanish into another dimension, Kamala returns to Earth without the cheer and bravado she usually has, but instead is on the verge of tears as she solemnly recounts to Fury how they lost Monica and what Carol is doing to fix Hala. Her family even notices, asking Kamala why she is crying.

Tropes P to Y

• Phlebotinum Overload: Dar-Benn destroys herself by attempting to use both bangles at once to tear a hole in space time, the energy completely vaporizing her. Kamala is able to use both just fine, though as a directed energy pulse used to charge up Monica.
• Planet Looters: The Kree exhausted the resources of their homeworld during the civil war, leaving it with no oceans, minimal atmosphere, and a dying star. Dar-Benn intends to use her bangle to open wormholes and siphon replacements from other planets.
• Planet of Hats: Aladna, a world where everyone communicates in song, Translator Microbes be damned. It's a borderline Wacky Wayside Tribe as well, apart from its plot significance as Dar-Benn's next target. And it has a standing army strong enough to take her forces on.
• Portal Network: After having been introduced in the Guardians of the Galaxy Trilogy, the origins of the Jump Point Network are finally revealed (and are integral to the narrative). Kamala's bangle and the one Dar-Benn uncovers are known as quantum bands, and were used to create the entire network long ago. Dar-Benn's reckless abuse of her bangle threatens to collapse the network and tear apart spacetime.
• Really 700 Years Old:
  • Yusuf tries to convince one of the S.A.B.E.R. technicians to plan for his retirement, even though the man seems to be in his thirties. He then reveals that he is actually a 300-year-old Asgardian.
  • Goose still looks like a healthy adult cat, even though it is now at least 40 years old (two or three normal cat lifetimes).
• Red Baron: The Kree refer to Carol as "The Annihilator".
• Regime Change: Carol effectively did this with the Kree in the aftermath of the first film. As she'd vowed to Yon-Rogg, Carol returned to Hala and destroyed the Supreme Intelligence to end its lies and warmongering. However, it also gets deconstructed, because Carol didn't think through the repercussions of suddenly and violently removing the leadership that had guided the Kree military and politics for over a millennium. Far from creating a more peaceful, kinder Hala, the resulting power vacuum instead threw the Kree Empire into chaos and triggered a multi-decade civil war.
• The Reveal: The real reason Carol has never come back to Earth to see Monica (let alone to help out with the domestic crises that the Avengers and other heroes have dealt with) is out of guilt for causing the Kree Civil War when she destroyed the Supreme Intelligence.
• Revenge: Dar-Benn's motivation. She holds Carol responsible for the Kree Civil War and the devastation of Hala because Carol killed the Supreme Intelligence.
• Revenge Before Reason: Dar-Benn wants to restore her homeworld and get revenge on Carol. Unfortunately, she cares so much about the latter that she does the former in the dumbest way possible. Her intent is to plunder other worlds for their resources to restore Hala, and to that end targets worlds that Carol holds dear, making her targets pretty easy to identify, as opposed to picking random targets that Carol could never find in time. Ultimately, she ends up killing herself because she's so focused on hurting Carol that she rejects Carol's selfless offer to reboot Hala's sun just so she can destroy Earth's sun instead.
• Running Gag: Kamala constantly brainstorming a superhero name for Monica. Eventually, even Carol starts throwing out ideas.
• Scarf of Asskicking: The Aladnans equip Kamala with a scarf. While fighting the Kree, Prince Yan tells her it is a weapon and she finds it makes an effective flail.
• Sequel Escalation: Less so for Carol and Monica, but definitely for Kamala. Her first appearance had her primarily acting as a Small Steps Hero within her small community of Jersey City, while this film has her embarking on an interstellar adventure with Monica and Carol, as per the trailers. Regarding the Captain Marvel franchise as a whole, it's another example, going from one main hero in the first film to three in this one.
• Sequel Hook:
  • The film ends with Kamala seeking out other young superheroes to form a new lineup of Avengers. Her first candidate is Kate Bishop, and it's implied that she's eyeing Cassie Lang next.
  • The Stinger reveals that Monica is trapped in a parallel universe where a Variant of her mother (known here as Binary) operates alongside the X-Men.
• Shaped Like Itself: Kamala tells Carol that there were star maps on Dar-Benn's ship. When asked to be specific, she nervously answers "To the... stars?", as she has no idea how to read them. Luckily, Carol has a Skrull memory scanner that she is able to use to find the map.
• Shout-Out:
  • The music playing over the flerken rescue scene is "Memory" from Cats.
  • Carol, who is just nonchalantly walking at the Aladna temple, responds "I am dancing" to Kamala's suggestion of such, much like Gurney Halleck tells Leto (while wearing a straight face) he is smiling.
• Single-Biome Planet: Aladna's surface is over 99% water.
• Smash Sisters: In the climax, Carol, Monica, and Kamala work together and exploit their entangled powers to fight Dar-Benn.
• Skewed Priorities: Kamala goes from freaking out over how she got into space to squeeing over seeing Nick Fury, briefly wondering if it's some kind of Avengers test.
• Solar CPR: Dar-Benn attempts this by siphoning off Earth's sun to refuel Hala's. After defeating her, Carol flies into Hala's sun and succeeds at this.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: As the Flerkens are sent to swallow Nick Fury's crew to ease the evacuation, the rather chaotic scene is punctuated with the song "Memory". Also qualifies as a Stealth Pun, as the song comes from the musical Cats.
• Special Effects Evolution: Beast's Cameo in the Mid-Credits scene is the first time the character is depicted entirely via CGI in live action. Previously, both Kelsey Grammer and Nicholas Hoult had to wear special make-up and prosthetics to portray the character.
• Star Killing: The Kree somehow drained their local star of energy during their civil war, leaving it on the brink of its red giant phase. Dar-Benn intends to siphon off Earth's sun to refuel it. After that plan is foiled, Captain Marvel flies through their star and uses her energy to restore it.
• The Stinger:
  • Monica wakes up in a hospital bed with who she thinks is her mother sitting beside her. After a moment's confusion, Beast, once again played by Kelsey Grammer, addresses the woman as Binary, confirming that Monica has somehow landed in the universe of the X-Men Film Series (or one very similar to it).
  • Near the end of the credits, the sound of a Flerken regurgitating can be heard.
• Stomach of Holding: Goose, the Flerkin, can devour objects and people many times her size without gaining size or mass, as well as later spit them out unharmed. Her kittens have the same ability.
• Superman Stays Out of Gotham:
  • Avengers: Endgame (and to a lesser extent the ending of the first Captain Marvel) had previously addressed and justified why Carol had stayed away from Earth and the local crises both before and after the Infinity War. The Marvels builds on that foundation and reveals additional context for her absence: Carol killing the Supreme Intelligence, an act that ignited the Kree Civil War and devastated Hala. Carol has remained in space trying to right other cosmic wrongs out of guilt and her failure to fix the Kree crisis.
  • Downplayed, but Goose's absence from the MCU in the decades since the first film (and why Fury didn't bring out the Flerken against Loki, Ultron, Thanos, or other crises) is also finally addressed. After Carol left Earth with Talos and the Skrulls, Fury gave Goose to Maria Rambeau. Maria remained Goose's caretaker until her death from cancer following the events of Avengers: Infinity War and the Snap. Carol then got custodianship of the Flerken, and Goose has been in space with her since the end of the Infinity Saga and into the Multiverse Saga.
  • After helping Emperor Drogge's colony escape from Tarnax, Carol enlists the help of none other than Valkyrie to find a new place for them to take refuge in, though she doesn't do much else once she takes the Skrulls off Carol's hands.
  • At the end of the film, Kamala ends up meeting Kate Bishop in New York to discuss the idea of forming a team with her. However, she only does this at the very end of the film where the main threat has already been taken care of, so it's still technically an example of this trope.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Nick Fury traveled from the station to Earth and back again in work clothing, so the Space Elevator is probably designed for civilian scientists, government personnel, etc. rather than astronauts and people with Super-Toughness. But no one in the Khan family has had any experience or training for going into space, the trip is unplanned, and they were worried for their daughter. So they are hilariously, but understandably, nervous about the trip.
  • Easy Amnesia doesn't exist in real life. When one experiences such a traumatic loss of memory as Carol's retrograde amnesia is, regaining the memories can sometimes be impossible. In this film, her amnesia is implied to have been permanent, as she's still using devices to stimulate her mind to try to find pre-1989 memories with limited success over thirty years later after the initial incident.
• Swap Teleportation: The running conflict of the film is Carol, Monica, and Kamala switching places with one another whenever they use their powers at the same moment, due to the machinations of the main antagonist entangling their powers. Kamala is able to bring other people with her if they're covered by her Hard Light barriers during the swap.
• Tag Along Kid: Kamala, of course, being the literal child of the group and the one most new to superheroics compared to Monica and Carol.
• Title Drop: When Kamala is brainstorming superhero names for Monica, she excitedly refers to the team as "The Marvels!"
• Trailers Always Spoil:
  • The final trailer released a few days before the film's release features a brief shot showing Dar-Benn's defeat/death.
  • One of the film's posters depicts Goose with her offspring.
• Training Montage: Once the women figure out how to exert some control over the Swap Teleportation (it only triggers if two of them use their powers in the same moment), they start training themselves in executing simple activities like double dutch skipping and playing catch while exchanging places, turning into a well-oiled machine.
• Trapped in Another World: In the stinger, Monica awakens to find herself trapped in a universe where the X-Men exist and her mother is a superhero named Binary.
• Trash the Set: The Swap Teleportation accidentally transports Kree soldiers into Kamala Khan's home, and they end up destroying it.
• Unnervingly Heartwarming: The Flerken kittens save the scientists by swallowing them into their stomachs.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • Carol destroyed the Supreme Intelligence shortly after the end of Captain Marvel to try and free the Kree of their oppressive AI overlord. All this did was plunge them into a civil war that rendered their homeplanet uninhabitable, and it also inspired Dar-Benn to use the Quantum Bands to fix Hala while getting revenge on Carol, kickstarting the events of this movie.
  • Kamala accidentally brings Kree soldiers into both her home and the orbital elevator.
• Vestigial Empire: The Kree Empire has seen better days thanks to Carol destroying the Supreme Intelligence shortly after her first film — an act that set off a decades-long civil war and devastated Hala.
• Whale Egg: Goose reproduces by laying fleshy eggs all over the station. It's hardly the weirdest thing about her biology.
• Wham Shot: In the stinger, Beast walks into the room and the camera pans to reveal that Monica is in the med bay of the X-Mansion.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Yon-Rogg's status in the decades since the first film. It's unclear if he was executed by the Supreme Intelligence for his failure, if he was spared but subsequently killed in the Kree Civil War, or is even still alive in the post-Infinity Saga era.
  • Though The Marvels defeat Dar-Benn, Monica performs a Heroic Sacrifice to seal the jump point breach near the sun, and Carol restores power to the Kree homeworld's sun— it's never made clear what happened to Aladna, as it was last seen with its ocean being siphoned to Hala. There is a single sentence about how "the planets are recovering", but nothing more.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Monica gives Carol an understated but no less devastating one over Carol never returning to Earth: "You said you'd be back before I knew it."
• With a Friend and a Stranger: Carol and Monica already knew each other since the '90s, before they're joined by Kamala the newcomer.
• A Wizard Did It: Pretty much Monica's answer when Carol question her about her powers.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Hala has become a dying world thanks to the devastation unleashed by the Kree Civil War. Dar-Benn also intended to invoke the trope by doing this to Earth too (and other planets dear to Carol) in order to punish Captain Marvel for her role in the devastation.

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Carol: I would never choose to bring anybody into this.
Monica: You are not the only thing standing between this and the universe.

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