It looked ambitious, but it also clearly looked like the kind of thing that could either be really good or really bad depending on how it was handled in execution. Could Marvel pull this off? It would be interesting to find out either way.
And then once the early episodes started getting released, the reviews on the Internet were all positive. Apparently Marvel was actually pulling it off.
And yet, for all that, I still planned on giving this series a pass. I'm super busy these days with the multiple jobs and the kid and everything. Watching this series wasn't on my list of priorities.
But then, I had the apartment to myself for a week after Tet as my wife and daughter stayed an extra week in her hometown. That, plus there was another mini-outbreak of Covid-19 in Ho Chi Minh City (*1), and the city went into semi-lockdown, which meant that I was spending way too much time alone in my apartment and started to get depressed and lonely, and craving distractions.
"Maybe I'll check out that Wandavision thing after all." (*2)
I was initially thinking I would just watch one episode to get the flavor of it--you know, just to find out what everyone else was talking about. And then I watched the second episode just to see where this was going. And then I watched a couple more episodes the next day and... at that point it was time to admit I had seen enough of the show that I might as well commit to seeing the whole thing through.
The Review (*SPOILERS*)
So, the first thing to note is that the production values on this seem to be really high.
Take my opinion with a grain of salt, because I don't actually know anything about how movies are made or how much they cost. But this looks really slick. It looks like something that could have been released in theatres if it had been a three hours shorter. (Obviously they saved some money by not having a lot of big action fight scenes, but then the story didn't really require too many fight scenes, so you didn't notice their absence.)
This, combined with the previews for the upcoming Loki and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier seems to mean that Wandavision is evidently the opening salvo in a new direction for the MCU. It looks like going forward the TV shows will now be cinematic in quality, feature the same actors and characters from the movies, tie-in much more closely with the movies and (presumably) be as influential in advancing the MCU plotlines as the movies are.
But at the same time, Wandavision and also the trailers for the upcoming Loki and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier also indicate the streaming TV format seems to be allowing the MCU the freedom to explore some weirder stories that probably would never have gotten approved for the cinema.
This is all quite exciting, and I look forward to seeing how this develops in the next few years.
Also, you've got to give Marvel credit where credit is due. Obviously several years ago someone at the studio said something like, "Look, these superhero movies we're doing are really popular right now. We could totally just keep riding this wave until the public gets sick of it. Or, we could start doing a lot of new and crazy things to constantly keep the public off-guard."
Marvel's track record is so impressive that in retrospect it's easy to forget how weird and strange a lot of these movies seemed before they came out.
The Avengers? You can't possibly make a coherent movie with all these different superheroes at once.
Guardians of the Galaxy? Nobody is going to be interested in these really obscure strange characters from comic books nobody has ever heard of.
Civil War? You can't possibly make an entertaining movie about superheroes fighting each other for two hours.
Thor: Ragnarok? Now this is really getting silly, isn't it?
Infinity War? Splitting the movie into two parts? That's not going to work.
And yet, they've all worked.
Mind you, they're not masterpieces. (Looking at my reviews, I've pretty consistently scored Marvel movies in the 4 to 8 star range.) But they work. They're solid enough movies.
And Wandavision works. It was a gamble, obviously, but it works.
...mostly. Actually, the premise doesn't really make sense if you think about it too much.
I'm willing to grant that Wanda would use her powers to create an idealized fantasy world, but to imagine that she'd start creating 22 minute TV episodes about her life is pushing it a bit, isn't it? And then what was her incentive for going in order through the history of television with each subsequent episode? And why did she create a broadcast signal? And why was she creating broadcast signals that would only work with televisions of the time? (How would she even have known what that broadcast signal looked like?) And what about the commercials? (And if she was raised on DVDs, as was later revealed, then why is she incorporating era-specific commercials into her broadcasts)?
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
The premise doesn't really make sense from an in-universe character logic standpoint. But it does make sense in terms of conforming to audience expectations. In other words, we the audience were pretty explicitly told from the previews that this was going to be some sort of bended reality in which Wanda and Vision were existing in television sitcoms from different eras. And having gotten onboard with that premise, we then made a sort of tacit agreement with the show's producers that we weren't going to examine the internal logic of this too closely. We were willing to give the show a lot of space in how it explained what was going on with the television sitcoms. At least, I was. And judging by the generally positive reviews this show has gotten, most other people were too.
In the initial episodes, the TV show was firing on multiple cylinders.
On its basic level, it was trying to get you to enjoy a sitcom about Wanda and Vision and their zany antics.
But at the same time it was also trying to evoke your nostalgia for old TV reruns by evoking an old aesthetic, and the show was also trying to impress you with how completely they evoked that old 1960s TV aesthetic (complete with ads and everything.)
But at the same time, it was also trying to get you hooked on the mystery of what was really going on.
But at the same time, it's also an MCU movie. The show was also trying to remind you about tie-in characters from other MCU movies, and clearly the ground work for future MCU movies (most obviously Captain Marvel 2) is being laid here.
So the success of each of these endeavors will have to be judged differently.
As someone who grew up on Nick-at-Nite reruns, I thought Wandavision did a decent job of recreating the aesthetic of these older shows. I initially had it in mind to criticize Wandavision for relying too heavily on specific shows instead of the aesthetic of the respective eras generally. (The first two episodes were less an homage to 60s TV generally, and more to Bewitched and The Dick Van Dyke Show specifically). But then in episode 8, we learn that Wanda was in fact influenced only by those specific shows which Wandavision explicitly names. So, fair enough, I suppose.
However, try as it might, Wandavision can't quite replicate the charm of those old TV shows. Bewitched and The Dick Van Dyke Show may be dated, but they were genuinely entertaining. And The Dick Van Dyke Show especially could be really funny at times. Wandavision is trying to recreate that experience, but it comes off as just a pale imitation.
Which is why I think the first 3 episodes of Wandavision drag a bit. There's an initial rush of "Hey! Cool! They're imitating the look of that old TV show!" But once that wears off (and it wears off quickly) Wandavision doesn't have quite the charm or the humor to carry the rest of the 22 minutes.
Of course, during the first 3 episodes, the audience is also supposed to be interested in trying to figure out what is going on. But, let's be honest, it was never really that much of a mystery, was it? Anyone familiar with the Scarlet Witch knows that she has a history of altering reality. (I wasn't even in the comic book scene when House of M came out in 2005, but it was a big enough event at the time that you couldn't help but hear about it.) So we all knew that Wanda was altering reality somehow. (*3)
Which is why I was feeling a bit restless near the end of episode 3, but (just in time) the end of episode 3 is when we break from Wanda's reality, and we start to get in to the real plot of the show. And so that held my interest.
And of course it was fun to see all those old characters from the MCU. Randall Park is excellent as Jimmy Woo (from the Ant-Man movies). He's a very charming actor generally, and has been underutilized in his previous appearances, so it was great to see more of him.
Darcy (from the Thor movies) was never really a fan favorite, but I never hated her either, and it was nice to see at least that the MCU hadn't totally forgotten about her.
I still haven't seen The Captain Marvel movie, so I don't really know the whole story behind Monica Rambeau, but apparently she ties in with Captain Marvel somehow.
The infamous casting of Evan Pieters as Quicksilver (from the X-Men movies) created a whole lot of speculation online about the multiverse and the future of the X-Men in the MCU. As it was meant to. And that was all part of the misdirection and the fun and the producers were having with the audience. But it's also dangerous to pull the audience out of the story like that. Anytime the fans are thinking more about the legal rights of the X-Men characters than they are about the story you are trying to tell, you risk losing the immersion.
But maybe this is part of storytelling in the Internet age? The buzz around the story is just as important as the story itself?
The final battle was, as most critics have pointed out, the most boring part of the story. Partly this was because this was a story in which the audience was more invested in the character arcs than in the fight. And partly this was because there's not a lot of interesting fight choreography you can do with two witches throwing spells at each other.
The story ended on a slightly confusing and disappointing note in my opinion.
Wandavision had clearly established that Wanda felt as if the twins were her real children, so I was surprised at how easily she was able to give them up at the end. (The emotional sacrifice was addressed in a line in the dialogue--"They'll never know how much you sacrificed for them"--but didn't seem to be shown on screen.)
Also, Wanda was somewhat confusingly allowed to walk away from the whole thing without really facing any consequences, or even appearing to come to terms with what she had done. The framing of the episode even suggested we the viewer were supposed to sympathize with Wanda more than the townspeople. This seemed like the show had dropped the ball on the moral ambiguity it had been building up so far.
Also, what happened with White Vision at the end? He had his memories restored, right? So you'd think he would want to return to Wanda at that point, but instead he just vanishes.
And how did Monica Rambeau get those powers? Something about passing through the hex, I guess. But why wasn't she more surprised when those bullets passed through her.
And what about...
...actually enough with the plot holes and nitpicks (*4) (We're going to be here all day if I get into every little nitpick. Plus, this being 2021, every plot point that could be nitpicked has already been written about by someone on the Internet.)
I'll just close with one last observation:
I'm a bit worried about how powerful Wanda is. It appears she now has near infinite and godlike powers, right? And I know this is a problem inherited from the comic books (The Scarlet Witch in the comic books was also way too powerful), but it's going to be hard to take any future stories in the MCU seriously from now on, right? You can't have real stakes anymore. Any future threat, and you could just say, "Well, why doesn't the Scarlet Witch just take care of this with her infinite amount of reality bending magical powers?"
...unless (and there are hints of this in the final scene)...unless the Scarlet Witch's next appearance is not as one of the Avengers, but as one of the antagonists. That could potentially be interesting.
I'll guess we'll have to wait and see what they do with it.
Marvel Cinematic Universe Links
1. Iron Man
2. The Incredible Hulk
3. Iron Man 2
4. Thor
5. Captain America: The First Avenger
6. The Avengers
7. Iron Man 3 5 Stars
8. Thor 2: Dark World 4 Stars
9. Captain America 2: Winter Soldier 4 Stars
10. Guardians of the Galaxy 6 Stars
11. Avengers: Age of Ultron 5 Stars
12. Ant-Man 6 Stars
13. Captain America 3: Civil War 8 Stars
14. Doctor Strange--Haven't seen yet
15. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 8 stars
16. Spider-Man: Homecoming 6 Stars
17. Thor: Ragnarok 8 Stars
18: Black Panther 6 Stars
19. Avengers: Infinity War 9 Stars
20. Ant-Man and the Wasp , 6 Stars
21. Captain Marvel--Haven't seen yet
22. Avengers: Endgame 8 Stars
23. Spider-Man: Far From Home 7 Stars
Footnotes (docs, pub)
(*1) The outbreak now appears to be under control, so no need to worry about me.
(*2) To answer the obvious question--I don't think Disney Plus is currently available in Vietnam. But copyright isn't strictly enforced in Vietnam, so there are a number of streaming websites in Vietnam which host all the latest releases. (I'm not proud.)
(*3) But at least the details were still mysteries. (What had happened with Vision's body? Was Vision really back from the dead now? Who was that voice on the radio? Etc.)
(*4) There is also, of course, the infamous ever-green nitpick that you can ask about any solo MCU project: Where were the rest of the Avengers?
It's a problem that's inherited from the world of comic books. There are team-up comic books, but there are also solo comic book. And if you're reading a solo comic books, it's no good constantly asking, "But where are the rest of the superheroes?" Having been a comic book geek in my youth, I learned to forgive this a long time ago. When Batman is fighting Bane (for example), it's no fair asking, "But where is Superman?" I mean, you could, but why would you? If you're going to nitpick that, you might as well just stop reading. You just have to assume that on Batman's solo adventures, Superman and all the rest of the other superheroes are busy somewhere fighting some other existential threat.
The same thing applies to the MCU.
Video Review
Video review HERE and embedded below.
Apologies about how terrible the video review is. I filmed this late at night on a day when I was tired from working and sleep deprived. Lately the only time when I can film videos is after the toddler has gone to bed, and filming late at night after a day of work does not bring out my best. I would have waited until the next day except I knew the circumstances would be exactly the same on the next day.
My general philosophy with the Youtube videos (and with this blog as well) is to just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. In other words, some of these videos turn out good, some of them turn out bad, but if I keep at it and keep making videos, eventually some of them are going to turn out good.
Who knows, in 10 years maybe I'll be in a position where I can start getting enough sleep and making better videos.
Also, yet another video in which I ramble on for too long, and get cut-off when my camera automatically shuts off after 30 minutes.
Translated by T.E. Lawrence ( Book Review -- Rereads , Classics , Greek Mythology ) Started : November 20, 2022 Finished : January 01, 2023...
