SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains mild spoilers for The Marvels. If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk!
While some of The Marvels takes place on Earth, the majority of the action in the new Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbuster takes place out in the cosmos – with heroes Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani) and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) searching for Kree leader Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) to stop her stealing resources from other planets. One of the wild new worlds that the movie explores is the music-filled wonder that is Aladna – and director Nia DaCosta has revealed how she brought it to life from the pages of Marvel Comics.
Aladna was first created by writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and David Lopez during the beloved 2014/2015 run of Captain Marvel comics, and when I spoke with The Marvels’ director earlier this month during the film’s Los Angeles press day, she explained that it was an exciting element that she and Marvel Studios were very much on the same page about from day one. She then noted the specific aesthetic she was going for when it came to designing the planet:
It was so funny, because when I came in to pitch for the movie, Aladna was a planet that Marvel was really excited about. And I know about Alanda from the comics and what the energy is there and who lives in Aladna, and so developing that was just working together to figure out what this feels like, what this looks like. And I really, for me, from like a visual point of view, was thinking a lot about Positano and just like Mediterranean – bright and sunny, bright, colorful clothing, like a crossroads of the galaxy.
The titular team in The Marvels travels to Aladna when they begin to suss out what Dar-Benn is trying to do. After the Kree antagonist removes the atmosphere from a planet with an established Skrull colony, the next resource she seeks is water, and Aladna makes a perfect target given that it’s 99.63 percent covered in the wet stuff. It also happens to be a place where Captain Marvel has deep ties, as she once had to wed Prince Yan (Park Seo-joon) as part of local politics. (Technically, this makes Captain Marvel a Disney Princess).
There may not be much actual land on Aladna, but Nia DaCosta sees the planet as a special port where races from across the galaxy gather and live in a song-filled peace:
So you get a lot of different alien races. And that was really fun for me, because it kind of reminded me a bit of like a Star Trek episode or something or being in Star Wars at the Cantina, you'd see this crossroads of all these aliens. So that was Aladna's big draw for me.
As for the special language that is spoken on the planet, Nia DaCosta credited collaboration. There were conversations with lyric writer James Murphy and composers Laura Karpman and Nico Muhly about how the music would be approached tonally and how it would best fit the film:
That was a journey of just figuring out what would make sense, and how big we wanted to go. Like did we wanna go camp? Did we wanna go grounded?... It was a journey with my composers and also James Murphy doing the music.
Audiences everywhere can experience The Marvels now, as the film is playing in theaters everywhere. For deeper coverage of the movie, check out both our Ending Explained feature and our deep dive into the end credits, and to keep track of everything that is going on in the MCU, check out our Upcoming Marvel Movies and Upcoming Marvel TV guides.
