Nia DaCosta’s science fiction adventure film The Marvels is gleefully silly, wonderfully charming, inventive, funny, and dramatic. It is also frustrating, overly complicated, buried up to its neck in continuity minutiae, and so reliant on its audience having seen multiple streaming serials that it’s honestly like a popcorn flick assigned its audience homework. This latest feature iteration – the 33rd – of Disney’s ongoing Marvel Cinematic Universe sees the wheels start to tumble off the studio’s 15 year-old money train. It has had the lowest-grossing opening week of the whole enterprise; 2019’s Captain Marvel earned something like a billion dollars in cinemas, while this idiosyncratic sequel has pretty much killed that franchise stone-dead. That’s one hell of an achievement, albeit probably not the one Marvel Studios hoped to make.

Attempting a coherent synopsis in a paragraph is a challenge. The short version: a vengeful alien zealot’s attempt to restore her ravaged home world to life causes the powers of Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), and Ms Marvel (Iman Vellani) to become quantum entangled. When each uses their powers, they swap places with another, causing havoc while they work to save the universe from collapse.

For the background on Captain Marvel, there’s her own feature to watch in advance. To understand Ms Marvel, there is a six-episode serial to see on streaming service Disney+. To make the jump from Monica Rambeau as an excited child in Captain Marvel to a cynical super-powered agent in The Marvels, you perversely have to view streaming serial WandaVision – which isn’t too bad, since seeing that also sets you up to understand Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022).

The growing ambition of Marvel Studios to tell a massive inter-connected saga has long since passed the point of absurdity. The assumption that a large-scale audience will follow both 3-4 feature films in cinemas each year, as well as almost as many short-run serials on streamer Disney+, has been demonstrably proven wrong, and The Marvels appears to be paying for that mistake with the lowest box office grosses in the history of the MCU. I had seen all of the previous Marvel features, as well as the charming Ms Marvel series, but I had bounced off WandaVision early in its run and therefore had no idea of Rambeau’s character development or newfound super-powers. The film does not sufficiently explain things; God only knows what it is like for viewers without Disney+. It is complicated enough if they do: one would assume the series Secret Invasion, a sequel narrative to Captain Marvel featuring several of its key characters, would tie into The Marvels as well. One would be incorrect. In fact, the two storylines do not even really align.

It is difficult to blame DaCosta. The story and broader narrative framework has been thrust upon her, and she is responsible only for The Marvels itself. In that regard she is broadly successful: the film comes with its own distinct tone, and an impressive focus on female characters. The trio of protagonists are innately likeable, and interact with one another remarkably well. A storyline that has at least been publicised as not having a great deal to do with the original Captain Marvel turns out to be a very relevant direct sequel. DaCosta’s use of contemporary hip-hop gives the various action scenes a lot of energy and humour. It is a messy film, but I have to admit this is a particularly fun one too.

A special note must be made of Iman Vellani’s bright, starry-eyed performance as Kamala Khan, the New Jersey-based super-fan whose own super powers now makes her a partner to her own heroine. She’s warm, enormously funny, and quite simply the best new MCU character in an absolute age. Whatever the future fortunes of this film’s characters, there positively must be a place for her in future projects. Hopefully they will be more self-contained ones.