In a normal year, I’d probably have two, maybe even three major comic book movie watches checked off my list by now. But 2020 isn’t a normal year.
Delivering pure, popcorn-munching escapism, the comic book movie has become a mega-genre in its own right and heading to the theatre to watch heroes and villains duke it out has been greatly missed during the great cinema shut down.
Marvel’s Black Widow was delayed until Nov. 6 and DC’s Wonder Woman 1984 has been pushed to Oct. 2.
But have no fear! The streaming networks are here — with a mixed bag of TV shows and movies to keep your comic cravings sated.
The Good
First up, The Umbrella Academy, now on its second season of Netflix, which is quickly becoming one of my favourite shows on Netflix.
The series follows seven super-powered people, heroes would be a bit too strong of a word, as they grapple with world-ending circumstances and their own personal struggles and vendettas.
It is almost criminally binge-able — I found myself staying up far too late in service of the ‘one more episode?’ dilemma.
The ensemble is the highlight, each of the seven with their own captivating back story and character arcs.
Vanya Hargreeves, played by Ellen Page, is the highlight of the highlights. Every scene she’s in she completely steals with her incredible skill, her gravity. Although she was somewhat regulated to the side in the first season, she takes centre stage in the second, and the show is better for it.
I haven’t been a huge fan of Netflix’s other directly comic book-related properties, like Daredevil or Jessica Jones, which had promising debuts before ultimately fizzling. But The Umbrella Academy has managed to rise to the top of my list for anticipated shows.
When’s season three already?
The Bad
I was a bit hesitant to start Amazon Prime Video’s The Boys, where much of the marketing made it seem like a gruesome, pessimistic take on superheroes. Turns out, it is just that — but it works.
When taken objectively, the very idea of super-powered humans running around fighting criminals, causing destruction without any need to worry about pesky things like due process or risk of reprisal is kind of a nightmarish scenario.
Couple that with an aggressively capitalist, corporate mandate and the heroes, or supes, of The Boys can’t really be called heroes at all.
It’s worth noting that I haven’t delved too deeply into The Boys yet, only episode three of the first season (the second season launched earlier this month), but from what I’ve seen so far, the satirical take on the genre is both compelling and shocking.
It starts with a horrific incident, where Hughie Campbell’s (Jack Quaid) girlfriend is accidentally killed (brutally) by a ‘supe’ called A-Train (Jessie T. Usher).
Campbell, devastated by the event, finds help in Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) who assembles a team dedicated to taking the corrupt supes down to get some much-needed justice.
It’s a concept I was skeptical of at first, and the gratuitous violence can be a lot to take, but it does a great job of highlighting how power can corrupt and the dangers of giving a select elite too much cultural and economic influence.
The Ugly
And then there’s Venom.
I missed this film when it first hit theatres in 2018, probably after feeling a bit of comic book fatigue as this was at the peak of Marvel’s ascendency into the cultural pantheon.
But seeing it pop up in Netflix on Sept. 2, I decided, eh, why not?
So how is it? It’s fine. It’s a perfectly middling “not bad”. One of those.
Tom Hardy stars as Eddie Brock a video journalist who’s been hit by some hard times, his fiancée leaves him, he loses his job and things are pretty bad. Then he gets infiltrated? Infected? By an alien parasite called Venom, giving Brock superpowers and a serious case of dissociative identity disorder.
What I was surprised by, given how horrific and intimidating the creature can be, was how charming the relationship between Brock and Venom is. It is a bit rushed, but the bizarre bond between the symbiote and the human actually weirdly works.
A lot of that is likely due to Hardy’s infectious performance, he goes all-in on the character, carrying the movie forward, which would otherwise squirm its way to the finish, like a symbiote without a host.
