from the comic books by Mark Millar and Frank Quitely
I have to be honest: I have mixed feelings about a lot of the work of famed comic-book writer Mark Millar. Apart from his early stuff for Marvel, including his phenomenal first run on The Ultimates which has explicitly been acknowledged as a huge influence on the Marvel Cinematic Universe in general and on The Avengers films in particular, and a yearlong run on Spider-Man that I genuinely enjoyed, his work has been somewhat hit-or-miss for me. I definitely had issues with the original Civil War comics and I enjoyed the movie far more, and I have also had my share of issues with his original work, of which I have read a smattering, like Chosen , Supercrooks and Kick-Ass. What irks about Millar's work is that too often, it feels like it's written primarily for the shock value, or is nothing more than shock for shock's sake.
That's not always the case, though; some of his original work stems from his genuine love of the superhero genre that he grew up with, and feels like an attempt to put his own spin on it, for better or worse.
Jupiter's Legacy, the recently released Netflix adaptation of one of Millar's original creations, which, I'll wager, was created with either the big or small screen already firmly in mind, strikes me as one of the latter kind of original work.
For eight episodes, showrunner Steven DeKnight and his team of writers and directors guide cast members of Josh Duhamel, Leslie Bibb, Ben Daniels and Matt Lanter, among others, through an engaging tapestry of stories that mix golden age superheroics and a more cynical, modern -day superhero narrative.
Duhamel and Bibb play spouses Sheldon and Grace, better known to the world by their superhero aliases the Utopian and Lady Liberty, who, together with Sheldon's brother Walter (Daniels), his friend George (Lanter) and a couple of other people founded the superhero team the Union of Justice in the 1930s. Nearly a hundred years after they first received their superpowers, the couple, having aged more slowly than most people but having aged nonetheless, find themselves grappling not only with a resurgent supervillain threat but with their own somewhat difficult, super-powered children, son Brandon aka Paragon (Andrew Horton) who is eager to follow in his parents' footsteps but is somewhat headstrong about doing it his own way, and Chloe (Elena Kampouris), who has turned her back on superheroing altogether for the fast-paced,drug-fueled life of a supermodel. When a new type of ultra-violent supervillain kills members of their team and forces Brandon to do the unthinkable, Sheldon and Grace find themselves confronted with difficult choices on how to proceed, and Sheldon finds himself looking back to where it all began: in the Great Depression, when he and his brother Walter were struggling to keep their father's flailing steel company alive.
I'll admit that the intertwining narrative of past and present was sometimes a chore to sit through, and that it isn't always smoothly handled, but all told, I sincerely liked this approach to superhero storytelling, not only marrying the Golden Age narrative with the more modern, darker take on the subject matter but making this marriage one of the central sources of conflict.
One of the main drivers of conflict in the story is the "code" of the Union of Justice, which really boils down to one simple rule: no killing. It's not the newest subject of debate in superhero storytelling; DC and Marvel have been pretty much doing it for years, but I really enjoyed the presentation of the characters' journeys from the Great Depression to nearly a century later.
It also turned the narrative on its head a bit; rather than the 30s era superhero being deprived of his virtuous parents, Sheldon instead discovers that his late father, who killed himself when his company went belly-up, isn't quite the hero he imagined him to be, which makes his journey as the scion of a failed steel tycoon one of redemption rather than revenge. I appreciated that it was this journey towards becoming a superhero that shapes his values, which eventually form the Union's code. Duhamel's committed performance makes it work. His code isn't born out of idealism, but out of the knowledge of what it means to live without a code, and I liked that. Duhamel, Bibb, Daniels and Lanter are at the heart of the story, and their synergy makes even the more out-there aspects of the narrative work, because they really give it a human core.
Given that this is a TV series, the seams in the visual effects tend to show fairly often. The super-speed and flying effects often made me wince. The production value on the whole is decent at best, and certainly nowhere near the much slicker Netflix offerings like Altered Carbon, but considering how Netflix has spent big and lost before, I get where they're coming from.
Jupiter's Legacy is a long way from being one of my favorite superhero stories, but it is a welcome distraction in these times and something decent to pass the time until the stuff I'm really looking forward to, like Trese and Lupin: Season 2 finally hit Netflix.
7/10
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