Tag: The Defenders

Season Reviews, TV

LUKE CAGE (Season 2) matures into one of the slickest superhero series around (TV Review)

A J. Black

If anything proves the Netflix corner of Marvel’s cinematic and TV universe has found its groove, or perhaps in this case its soul groove, it is the second season of Luke Cage.

Marvel’s partnership with Netflix to weave together four shows set in New York City has reached an interesting place, after three years of regularly airing content. The Punisher added a fifth main show to the mix late last year after The Defenders, a much-touted coming together of Cage and fellow heroes Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Iron Fist, underwhelmed a great many. Iron Fist’s first season last year suffered a critical mauling, while people have been lukewarm on Jessica Jones’ recent second season – after it raced out of the gate in late 2015 with a powerful piece of comic-book television. In other words, the Netflix corner of Marvel is drifting a touch, and is in sore need of a booster to remind people of how good it can actually be.

It looks like Luke Cage may, therefore, have returned at just the right time.
Luke Cage as a show is possibly the most consistent entry to the Marvel-Netflix collaboration of series. The first run, which aired in mid-2016 before Daredevil’s second season and Iron Fist’s debut, established a unique tonality which a lot of the other Marvel series have struggled to find. Daredevil dropped off a cliff in its second season when it attempted to introduce wonky mysticism into the plotting, the same jarring karma which sank Iron Fist before he even really got going – and compromised parts of The Defenders too. Jessica Jones, on returning, simply could not shake off the ghost of the Purple Man aka Kilgrave, and the remnants of its pre-#MeToo abuse of power narrative.

Luke Cage, by contrast, grows into its own in its second year, building on the already solid foundations laid by its first season.

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Essays, TV

JESSICA JONES, Marvel Malaise and the Pacing Problem

A J. Black

Let me tell you a story about Marvel, more specifically my relationship with the Netflix corner of the Marvel Cinematic/Television Universe. Having just digested all of the second season of Jessica Jones, the latest entry in the Marvel TV stable, it’s time we had an honest chat about these shows and how there’s a problem I just cannot get past.
Pacing.

Jessica Jones had a really impressive first season, and still could well stand as the strongest run in what, at the current count, stands as eight thirteen episode seasons that have encompassed the Netflix TV corner set in and around Hell’s Kitchen in New York City, with a ninth on its way in the next few months. Melissa Rosenberg’s adaptation of the comic Alias Jessica Jones (the Alias dropped in part to prevent confusion with ABC’s spy-fi drama of the same name) made a star of the biting and droll Krysten Ritter as Jessica, a super-powered private detective with a caustic attitude and few social skills, and told a quite violent, harrowing and dramatic story all about an abusive, controlling relationship & the psychological scars of rape. It was, on the whole, pretty superb television.

The second season was always going to have a difficult job living up to the story of Jessica’s mental and physical battle against the mind-controlling monster Kilgrave (played with sadistic relish by David Tennant), and never quite manages to match it for raw, heartbreaking power, but Rosenberg successfully does manage to craft a tale which naturally follows up on Jessica’s determined destruction of a man who corrupted, abused and violated her; a tale in which Jessica faces her own origin story, in a sense, and reunites with the mother she believed long dead, who turns out to be a darker and even more troubled reflection of herself.

Thematically, Jessica Jones remains about abuse, abusers and the search for ‘normal’ in a world filled with fractured families and controlling parents, siblings and lovers.

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Essays, Film

Cinematic Universes: the divisive wave of cinema’s future

A J. Black

With the advent of Justice League, many fans and commentators are once again discussing the concept of the ‘Cinematic Universe’, given the formative attempts by DC Comics over the last several years to emulate the rampant success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the first truly successful and revolutionary cinematic model of an overarching mythological world of characters and narratives informing one another.

Inevitably with the internet, it’s leading to a war of trolls – Marvelita haters and DC sceptics waging a pointless conflict over territorial ownership and trying the answer the utterly subjective question – ‘which is better?’. For every critic who tells you the MCU is technically stronger as a tapestry, you’ll easily find more than enough ‘DCEU’ defenders to race in with their Amazonian swords and claim everything Marvel has done is powerfully overrated.

There can be no victor in such a battle.

In truth, discussion of the Cinematic Universe has never gone away. Hollywood and the blockbuster movie system has been utterly consumed and dominated by the power of a connected storytelling model, following the template Marvel Studios laid down. It has arguably changed the very fabric of the cinematic franchise. Following the essential advent of the ‘blockbuster’ in the mid-1970’s with Jaws and of course Star Wars, it took Hollywood a while to truly embrace the idea of creating what we accept as a ‘franchise’.

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