Nigh Invulnerable

 

Jupiter's Legacy

starring Leslie Bibb, Josh Duhamel, Elena Kampouris, Ben Daniels, Andrew Horton, Mike Wade, Matt Lanter, Ian Quinlan and Kurtwood Smith

created by Steven S. DeKnight (based on the comic book series by Mark Millar and Frank Quitely)

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Invincible

starring Steven Yeun, Sandra Oh, J.K. Simmons, Gillian Jacobs, Zazie Beetz, Andrew Rannells, Walton Goggins, Zachary Quinto, Jason Mantzoukas, Kevin Michael Richardson, Clancy Brown, Mark Hamill, like a zillion others...

created by Robert Kirkman and Simon Racioppa (based on the comic book series by Kirkman, Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley)

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People like to complain about the thumping mass-media cultural ubiquity of the superhero genre, but they can chill the fuck out, in my opinion. It doesn't "crowd out" smaller films and art-houses. If there was direct competition between smaller films and blockbusters, there wouldn't have been art houses in the first place. There's romance to sitting by yourself at 4 am in the dingy 50-seater that shows Les Quatre Cent Coups on an endless loop all-hours until the film snaps, but nobody is going to pretend that's a formula for return on investment. The impracticality of it is the point; that's what romance is for. It's the same idea that keeps florists in business.

Are there fewer small films? Maybe. It depends on how you define "small film." Does it have to be shown in a theater? Or if a writer/director's vision is realized on direct-release to Hulu, does that not count because you can watch it in your underwear in your living room? The paradigm now is that there's more money for filmed entertainment than there ever, ever has been, and it's not close. It's just the experience of them, and the expectation of the experience of them have changed. If it's designed to be watched in your underwear, then the content is going to be conceived of and delivered optimized for underwear-watching.

Meanwhile multinational corporations are going reserve the investment of a global distribution rollout for wall-shaking theater display for things they can sell without regard to language or cultural nuance, which means giant green rage monsters punching armored space worms in the face, to infinity and beyond. The genre has worked, arguably since X-Men in 2000, but really really since Iron Man in 2008. Yes, it's everywhere. Yes, it dominates. But look, four out of five films were westerns from the time film was invented until Martin Scorsese kicked the genre to death, stuffed it in a car trunk, then stabbed it a few more times for good measure around 1970. There are a lot of years to go before Spider-Man begins to threaten that record.

In the meantime, we have to wade through reconsiderations and retrenchments and attempted undermining of the "corporate" feel-good superhero film in the midst of the genre ascendency, cranked out by scrappy indie little guys like Netflix and Amazon.

Like anything, the quality is going to... uh... vary. The biggest swing to date has been The Boys on Amazon, a show that shouldn't really work, but does as it leans into the bleak nihilism of its premise and execution so hard, it comes shooting out the other side (in a spray of shattered bone and human brains) as... satire? Sort of? Either by commitment to the bit or just by lucky timing relative to the rest, it's the standard by which others are measured.

It's also why I know Jupiter's Legacy suuuuuucks. I know that's not a particularly subtle or reasoned position, but if it existed on its own, the absolutely maddening choices for some of the worst wigs outside of sports broadcasting would be enough to condemn it. It's not just that the character design is poor, the costume design is poor, the production design is sterile and distant, the dialogue is stilted and aloof, the scenes lack coherence inside any kind of compelling story structure, all of which makes the relationships between characters unconvincing to the point of being dismissible... OK, it's all those things, but mostly it just lacks a reason to exist. There's a relentlessness to The Boys, a propulsion driven maybe by just being disgusted with itself; an inevitability, like the need to vomit after some mercury poisoning. You wouldn't call it pleasant, but you feel pretty good afterward. Jupiter's Legacy is a placeholder for an actual idea, an outline of basically just exposition. It's the show Lost but without the character flashbacks. And a way more gray, non-jungle setting. The actors do their best, especially a game Leslie Bibb and Ben Daniels, but there's only so far you can get with a roadmap to nowhere. There's no twist or subversion. The only question the whole show seems to be asking is "what if it was superheroes, but they were more sad?"

Invincible is asking a completely different question, but it's a much more focused, much more narrow one and it feels infinitely more expansive as a result. Invincible isn't about what superheroes do, it's about who they are, not in a limited, old-fashioned character-development kind of way. It wants to fuck with a very specific slice of the superhero trope, namely: the origin story.

Oh and it has character development too. There are people in this show! Drawn cartoon people, but more people-people than any of the gloomy mannequins in Jupiter's Legacy.

The origin story is the ultimate cheat of tropes, one the genre leans on incredibly hard. Every time you first see a superhero, we're stuck with the origin story. So the dweeby or overlooked person gets whammied with the cosmic whatsit and boom, now s/he has an 8-pack and a form-fitting jumpsuit, which gives the illusion of character growth, but is really just evidence of Zachary Levi working out like a fucking fiend for nine months before shooting started. Which is fine! They do that in romantic comedies all the time where the "homely" girl lets down her hair and takes off her glasses and suddenly she's Rachel Leigh Cook or whatever. OK, that reference is proof positive I haven't seen a romantic comedy since maybe 1996, but tropes are tropes and I'd stake my actual human life on the likelihood that some version of that still goes on.

There's no way to get around the origin story as it always defines the hero for the rest of their careers as heroes. Invincible asks the very interesting question: what if your origin story is a lie? Or further, the circumstances of your entire existence? And by extension, literally all the relationships around you and every life you touch? It's a level of deliberate fuckery that keeps things moving, despite a few stretches of kind of dead space-filler action (the whole Mars thing?), which may be redeemed by paying off in future plotlines. It earns its benefit of the doubt.

As far as the nuts and bolts go, despite some pretty scruffy animation at times, Invincible really steps it up in the action sequences. The conflicts feel weighty, the punches land, the violence is shocking and the choices matter, up to and including death. Nobody feels safe, except the title character, but even then, given the events of the first episode, you're never quite sure how any fight will go or how any plot point will resolve itself (or reveal itself out of fucking nowhere). It makes for compelling, satisfying viewing.

These are words that can't be said of Jupiter's Legacy, which has really just one or two decent fights in it and even those feel diligently stodgy. Not only were the stakes unclear, but the combatants were a mystery. Why was anyone fighting, ever? We're left to assume all the aggression is wig-based. Maybe that will all pay off in future plotlines but... oh... oh yeah... sorry...