Netflix finally missing a shot: Marvel's Luke Cage

To understand the title, I immediately redirect you to the other two reviews on Marvel's superheroes on Netflix: Daredevil and Jessica Jones. There you will find why Netflix was taking over the business and smashing any competition. 

It was thus a big surprise when I finished Marvel's Luke Cage: it is not at the level of the other two. Not even close. I will try to explain why and remain spoiler-free.

Luke Cage was introduced in the Netflix universe during the first season of Jessica Jones. He is a bartender somehow connected to the recent past of Jessica and it turns out he has superpowers: his skin is indestructible and he is superstrong. Here, we find him in Harlem a few months after the events of Jessica Jones, living a quiet anonymous life. 

The season is essentially an origin story: the events will make Luke Cage take action against the evil villain, forcing him to face his obscure past and finally move forward. Always. I will say no more to let you discover it by yourself. 

The first issue is the most problematic one and is about the hero himself. I have the same issue with Superman: any challenge is futile until kryptonite appears. For Luke Cage is even worse since there is no kryptonite for him. The immediate consequence is that any action scene loses its tension and they are not choreographically good as in other shows. Why dodge a bullet if it bounces on you? I can save a few of them because we can all like a power player from time to time but, in general, they are very underwhelming.

Luke Cage's kryptonite is really only his past and his consciousness. This is well displayed in the show, but I never felt tension when his fate was on the line. If you have an invulnerable character you need to give him some sort of deepness, some moral purpose, something other than the usual call for justice and revenge we are used to seeing. We thus have to look how the character and the story are presented.

Most of these guys wear spandex, who would have thought that a black man in a hoodie would be a hero

The entire story takes place in Harlem, therefore we have glimpses of Harlem's culture and how the characters are participating in such culture, what is their role. When it comes to Luke Cage, we can appreciate an attempt to give him some political weight by making him expressing some opinions on the role of the community. In particular, it comes to my mind a very intense monolog on Crispus Attucks and the use of the N-word. However, such attempts are quickly lost after the first few episodes, leaving the picture incomplete and thus failing in drawing a character that creates tension or emotions. The collateral effect is representing a community through powerful messages and then fall in the most generic silliness. Allow me a very insignificant spoiler: a black kid is beaten up by the police during an interrogation and the community, after like 5 minutes of rage, responds by giving the police better guns. That's generic silliness.

Another big issue is the presence of too many villains in one season. In a superhero show, the villain is 80% of the final result because what makes the story interesting is the struggle, how the superhero overcomes the adverse conditions and defeats the villain. In Luke Cage, there is a potentially great villain that is then wasted, lost and obscured by other breaking into the scene, villains way less interesting and way over the top. 

The storyline is then confused because force the viewer to shift the attention to different menaces. 

There is this villain!
Forget about that, now there is this one!
What's up, guys? I am another one, watch me!

The result is either a very non-linear narration or a very slow one, needing half of the season to even begin.

One last remark about the crossover technique, which was one of the strong suits of Jessica Jones. If the viewer was able to appreciate everything of the last year's show without knowing the rest of the Marvel universe, this time I feel like you actually lose something. You don't get the reasons why some character acts in a certain way. Therefore I feel one of the revolutionary aspects introduced by Netflix one year ago as lost in favor of a more conventional marketing strategy.

In conclusion, it is a show that brings some fun, the technical execution is at the level of the others, but fails in being innovative as it could be. A not so well characterized superhero, a not convincing narration structure, and the feeling that the only reason of its existence is a set up of what is coming next year on Netflix all make the show a forgettable one and several steps behind the previous two.

The fall of the titan: Mr. Robot

I took my time to re-watch the two seasons and be sure about what I want to discuss here. Before moving forward, I have to admit that I can't hold such discussion without talking about specific events of the 22 episodes aired so far. So consider yourself warned, there will be spoilers.

I also have to admit that I am writing these lines with the spirit of a betrayed lover. Therefore, to explain my feelings, I have to justify both the love and the betrayal.

The love was coming from season 1. I am not afraid to say that Mr. Robot (with Sense8 a close second) was the best show of the past year for the concept, the message and, most of all, the execution. The structure of the narration was nearly perfect, moving the plot at every given episode without wasting any time: every single storyline matters in the big picture of the full season. I can spend many words on the convincing acting or the amazing camera work, or on how much I loved the soundtrack (and how they brutally interrupt it to let a scene suddenly begin). The psychological drama was in a sense hidden in the frame of the plot before revealing itself in that eighth episode and then explode in the amazing next one.

You knew it all along, didn't you? 

It is thus clear that living up to that level is difficult for any show. If you try to look at it with a cold heart, you will notice that you have enjoyed a show that is basically a montage of different movies. The high skill of the creators was lying precisely in feeding us something that we knew all along and yet entirely different and exciting. For this reason, I look at the first season as a miracle of TV Shows.

However, considering my high expectations, season 2 turned out to be such a mess on almost every good aspect of the previous one. I can't help to consider this a betrayal.

First of all, the season suffers from a problem sadly common to many many movie sequels/prequels: a good part of it is dedicated to explaining the previous season. Such explanations, like the episode that opens up with a flashback to the moment when they decided to do the hack, do not add anything to the story and, therefore, have no reason to be there. In a season that, as we will see in a moment, has to explore so many storylines, adding unnecessary details to something that already happened makes the narration cumbersome and confusing. 

It appears clear that the plots to be explored are 4:

• How they follow up the attack
• How they escape to the FBI
• What the Dark Army and WhiteRose have in mind
• What's the next move of the E-Corp

These were the plots to be developed and to some extent they were. My problem is in those useless flashbacks and in what surrounds them. One plot above all: Joanna, Tyrell Wellick's wife. At the beginning of the season, she is covering something up about the hack by paying and then killing (s02e05) the guy that woke up Elliot at the end of the previous season (s01e10). Then she is struggling to maintain a clandestine relationship with the boring but beautiful guy that punches like a little girl. Her continuous presence on screen is not justified by the events, I waited and waited to see if she got eventually relevant, but no. She receives calls for the entire season, that would be interesting if they were coming from Tyrell; except they were coming from another insignificant character! Her presence just slows down the stories and it is, in the big picture, irrelevant. 

One may argue that it will be relevant in the next season so they, so to speak, kept her character warm for the viewers. But this is a betrayal of the first season's approach where nothing was there only to set up a sequel.

Another element of confusion is the character of Angela. She is popping out everywhere in the story, in every subplot. She does everything, she even knows how to contact Tyrell and even WhiteRose is surprised of her. Her character takes so many spins and turns along the season to lose any identity: she is just what is needed to move the plot along, the Angela ex machina. 

Control can sometimes be an illusion, but sometimes you need illusion to gain control.

The first episodes were mostly dedicated to exploring the psychological drama of the main character, Elliot. This was done perfectly, with him fighting his alter ego and then understanding how to live with it (except falling in another illusion of control). I started to appreciate that only during my second viewing, especially once that I was sure what was the end of the mentioned illusion. It is precisely this difficulty in being involved in this new season that made me focus on another sloppy aspect of the show. 

We can all agree that the opening is very dense of plots to be wrapped together, reminders of what happened a year ago, and Elliot descending to madness. Thus I now justify the difficulties that brought Sam Esmail to apologize on twitter. However, after episode 5, the narration is confusing, jumping from character to character without a specific logic. Sometimes the authors interrupt one plot for 1 or even 2 episodes, moving our attention somewhere else. This can be a strategy to transmit the chaotic state of mind of the protagonist, but the effect is rather making the viewer less involved in what was happening on the screen. 

I could surely mention a few great scenes or even great episodes, from now and then. I surely appreciated the bold experiment of episode 6, where Elliot finds himself living in an illusory world based on the Tv Show Alf, a situation heavily recalling a scene from Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers that is one of my favorite movies. But if I have to evaluate the season in its entirety, Mr. Robot falls short even if I do not consider my high expectations.

You realize that the episodes that effectively develop the plots listed above are less than 5. In a 12 episodes season long, this is a failure at the level of Game of Thrones. The powerfulness of the show was to create a cluster of episodes where everything ultimately mattered and contributed to the final result. The plot was interesting and loaded with complexity by itself, the narration was then direct because further complications weren't needed. Here we just have another show trying to drown itself in the storytelling. The complexity is now coming from a cumbersome narration rather than from the plot itself.

The entire post could have been shorter, containing the single thoughts that surprised me at the end of season 2: I didn't want to find out immediately what happens next. This is how bad it was. And we can only feel sorry about that because we have probably lost a gem.