The Marvels Makes Secret Invasion Even More Pointless
The Marvels fails to make any significant MCU connections to the Secret Invasion TV Series - even the most obvious and necessary ones.
The Marvels is now out in theaters, and of all the fun twists and turns the film offers, one of the most disappointing reveals is just how little the movie incorporates Nick Fury's character arc and storyline from the Secret Invasion Disney+ series. Indeed, by the end of The Marvels, it's undeniably clear that Secret Invasion is one of the most irrelevant Marvel Cinematic Universe projects ever, in addition to just be being one of the worst.
(SPOILERS For The Marvels & Secret Invasion)
The story of Secret Invasion saw Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) having to account for the fact that he and Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) failed for decades to find Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) and his colony of refugee Skrulls a new home in the cosmos, following the events of the first Captain Marvel movie. That failure sparked an entire splinter cell of Skrull extremists, led by Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir). By the end of the series, Gravik had created a new Skrull superpowered evolution (the Super Skrulls), resulting in one Skrull (Emilia Clarke as Talos' daughter G'iah) becoming arguably the most powerful being in the universe. We also learned about Nick Fury's secret life with his Skrull wife, Varra (aka Priscilla), and once they worked out the marital issue of Varra having joined with Gravik, she and Fury were seen heading up to the S.A.B.E.R. space station with renewed purpose of getting the Skrulls a new home.
How The Marvel's Makes Secret Invasion Irrelevant
Nick (Not So Much The) Fury – In The Marvels, it's not really debatable to say that we get a completely different Nick Fury than the one we see in Secret Invasion. The TV series had Jackson doing some of the most dramatically intensive acting he's done as Fury. In fact, scenes of Jackson's aging and somewhat broken super-spy having intense chess game conversations with other talented actors (Don Cheadle's Rhodey, Mendelsohn's Talos, Olivia Colman's Sonya Falsworth) were the only real highlight to speak of in Secret Invasion.
The Marvels trades the few interesting new turns in Fury's character for a comedic relief performance. There's not one real significant moment of progression in Fury's story, despite The Marvels being the first significant reunion of him and Carol Danvers onscreen. The pain of Gravik and his followers was primarily aimed at Fury and Danvers – pain that never seems to have affected Fury or Carol on any significant level.
Where Is Mrs. Fury? – Varra and Fury's relationship was a beating heart that Secret Invasion sorely needed, as it opened up a new side of Fury we never expected to see. Secret Invasion's ending sequence is Fury finally kissing Varra in her Skrull form, and taking her with him aboard the S.A.B.E.R. station. The Implication was that like Fury, Varra had little to left for her on Earth after Skrulls were exposed and being hunted (thanks to Gravik), so going up to S.A.B.E.R. and once again aiding her people was a natural next step.
However, Varra (Charlayne Woodard) is nowhere to be found in The Marvels – nor is there even a throwaway mention of her from Fury. It's as if Secret Invasion never happened.
Skrull Real Estate – The whole point of Secret Invasion's conflict was that the Skrull marooned on Earth (or called there) from the 1990s to the 2020s needed a place to live and couldn't find one – the implication being that those kinds of safe spaces were hard to find in space.
However, in The Marvels, Carol, Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), and Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) make a pit-stop on Tarnax, a planet where a different outpost of Skrulls is negotiating resettlement options with the Kree. The sequence on Tarnax raises a lot of new questions about just what kind of real estate problems the Skrulls are having. The Marvels certainly makes it seem as though there are enough Skrulls out in the cosmos looking for a home that Talos and his followers could've joined with. At the very least, Gravik's campaign of vengeance looks ridiculous when he apparently had the option to leave Earth and be with other Skrulls for years before becoming a terrorist.
The Super Skrull - There's a Skrull out there with powers arguably stronger than "The Annihilator" Captain Marvel. But apparently, that's not a factor in all the Kree/Skrull conflict happening around the galaxy. Go figure.
In the end, The Marvels and Secret Invasion are the clearest signs yet that the MCU has lost its power when it comes to interconnected storytelling. Like WandaVision and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the disconnect between MCU movie and MCU Disney+ series is just too wide to ignore.
The Marvels is now in theaters. Secret Invasion is streaming on Disney+.
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