After eternity and a half, Amazon’s Invincible has landed, with a great mix of personality, grandeur and direction to boot. Going straight into some heavy spoilers here, so catch up on the first episode or three if you think you might have even a vague interest.
1. Adaptation is its own art form
So coming over as a fan of the comic (which hopefully you’ve all had the joy of reading too), it’s hard not to be staggered by the perfect nuance this series takes to the process of adaptation. Even from the first scene it establishes that the series is going to be straying from the rigid interiority the comic gave us with Marc Grayson. Then from this new base it manages to find its own balance on the needle-point between parody and austerity, a balance Kirkman, Walker and Ottley’s comic rode too. I might be painting a pretty broad brush here, but you see that same mediation between an empowerment narrative and satire in The Boys, also from Amazon, albeit in a whole other manner.
I also just can’t emphasise enough how the shift from Science Dog to Seance dog is the greatest example of text to screen adaptation in recorded history, Charlie Kaufman should be shaking in his boots right now. I don’t want to jinx it, but watching one perfectly resonant episode like this just proved to me how much I want to see the comic’s longevity reflected here. I want to just see it find joy in its incremental scale and craft, especially with a cast and crew as obviously passionate as this. That said, I would really appreciate them getting through the high school stuff quickly.
2. Style and Substance
One element that obviously couldn’t carry its exact uniquity to the screen was the Cory Walker/Ryan Ottley art and design of the original book. In projects of this size, house styles and locked designs end up bringing a certain bit of homogeny to characters, you lose something. That said, having original series artist Cory Walker serving as lead designer really allows the show to shoot past this problem, as he breathes life into a new range of sharp and engaging brands of art for the show. For example, I really need to express how great the hair is in this show.
This flair for composition extends really organically to the sound design, which just bounces so engagingly between diegetic and nondiegetic material. That semiquaver beat as Invincible throws Killcannon through something like 12 layers of concrete? Can’t say it wasn’t hot. The whole stylisation of presenting sound is really reminiscent of the intro presentation too, with this larger-than-life primary color logo is used to make Marc’s cut-off dialogue reverberate even more.
3. ”I choose us”
It says a lot when a premiere can start off as cheerily and end as brutally as this, yet still seesaw between those two extremes at any given moment in the middle. Getting to meet this Secret Service agent who is engineered to produce the maximum amount of audience sympathy possible in the two minutes of dedicated screen time he’s given is such a great way to build tension. Not for the man himself, but for the fear that this is the show that will kill the puppy dog. A piece of TV that’s going to build sympathy just for the delight of shattering it. Instead we’ve found something much more interesting.
We get the same thing after our intro/outro with the Guardians of the Globe, who range from daring to dull, snobbish to sensitive, they’re all these unique beings, all growing beyond the parody they embody. So when we get that first iconic blood splatter, as Red Rush just turns to paste between Nolan’s hands, you know you’re in for some good shit. I was expecting something brutal, but I was not expecting THIS brutality. The candidly rendered violence and pain of the original comic was always an important grounding point for the power these heroes represented, so seeing that so thrillingly and irreverently rendered in the show gives ultraviolence a real twinge of nostalgia.
Cheerful and brutal. It’s not a spectrum when you tie it into a bow.
Continued below4. At least I don’t have a crush on the other evil Amazon Superman
JK Simmons has more or less monopolized my brain for extended periods of my life, with more than zero occult rituals to show for it. To this day Whiplash is my favourite film of all time, pile on top of that The Frontrunner, Counterpart, Juno, his decidication for getting pictures of Spider-Man, and that time he got so unnecessarily buff just to wear a trenchcoat in three minutes of a movie, you’ve got a star worth loving. So keeping that level of impartiality in mind, I really liked the portrayal of Omni-Man in this pilot. Not only did the animators nail that dreamy ’Superman, if he was your cool uncle from Colorado’ look, but they captured all three tones of the character impeccably. In one corner you have the ever-too-confident but supportive dad Nolan, who can just as quickly shift gears and hammer his son in the chest like the eugenist nightmare Viltrumite he was raised to be, all while projecting this milquetoast superhero demeanour to the world. It’s a great array that doesn’t even have that feeling of canned duplicity to it.
It’s these layers of emotional secrecy that also makes the parental moments on display so charming. Even just focusing on his relationship with Marc (although I’m itching to talk about how perfectly JK Simmons and Sandra Oh bounce off each other as Nolan and Debbie), you see how the writers have perfectly encapsulated this feeling of being on the brink of adulthood and trying to learn from your dad. You’re trying to be as grown up as he is even though there’s this obvious predication of vulnerability too, since you just don’t know how to do what he can. That feeling really comes to a head in their training scenes and their father/son game of catch around the hemispheres, where they can’t even face one another, in total spite of the americana of it all.
5. Marc Grayson, a Broken Boy
One of the crowning moments of this episode was Marc Grayson’s ‘what’s up danger’ moment, something every young hero should have, featuring the accompaniment of Cage the Elephant’s Broken Boy no less! The song is such a perfect pick in terms of shadowing the character, on one hand it’s a rhythmic power-anthem with a great instrumental balance, highlighting all that multifaceted power and potential Marc has. But then you dissect the tone and tale of the song, which is all about an empowered outsider who was ‘burned by the cold kiss of a vampire,’ or basically given their power by a deceitful figure who ‘promised [him] the keys to an empire.’ Of course, there couldn’t be any possible father/son foreshadowing in that could there?
Food for thought:
– I love seeing how this show is starting to explore the reality of super-physicality through Marc’s navigation of his new identity. Whether it’s an interrogation of the technicalities in how he moves with the air around him, or exploring how emotional power dynamics work when you premise them on these outrageous inequalities. It’s just something that grounds these elements in reality without a big fistfight.
– The show swung into shitty dad territory hard and fast
– The fact that you have Mahershala Ali in this cast and he’s only on screen for like a minute is hilarious.
– It also goes without saying Steven Yeun, Mark Hamill and Sandra Oh are all perfect picks for their characters. So many of the voices in this show just full inhabit these roles.
Next time we’ll be back to look at “Here Goes Nothing,” in a funeral-tastic second outing.
