cbrueggemeyer

I am one of those people that look forward to new Marvel creations earnestly, whether it's a show or a movie. It's safe to say I was thoroughly disappointed by the 3 episode premiere of this TV show.

The plot is poorly written and has very little to do with the overall MCU (once again), the characters are shallow, boring, and more focused on looking cool and speaking with modern lingo than doing anything worthwhile, and the main character fails to carry the show. First of all, her motivations are completely selfish. She just wants to build and upgrade her suit and talk to her AI ghost friend, she does not seem to care about helping people at all, scheming, stealing, and blackmailing her way through the first 3 episodes.

Technically, it's pretty well made (rather than the writing and acting), but I feel like that has become standard for Marvel productions. If you are throwing that much money at something and have that large of a cast it should be. But I don't want to spend hours watching a petty criminal going through a prolongued therapy session so I think I'm out after 3 episodes.

I know Netflix is used to just throwing money at movies, hiring a few stars, and trying to get as many eyes on the finished product as possible - but they must have been disappointed when they saw this end result.

This one is a tough watch - the pacing is weird, the characters are pretty one-dimensional, and the audience for this movie is questionable. It's not quite a kids movie but the concept is too whacky and poorly-executed to be taken seriously by an adult population. For example, the pen-ultimate all robot fight (featuring a live action Chris Pratt) is just plainly absurd - and not in a good way.

It was one of those moviegoing experiences where you double take and think to yourself "what the hell did I just watch?"

I think where this series goes wrong is it is beholden to fit inside of the Marvel Universe brackets while making slight variations to set it in another "universe". As a storytelling device, this whole "alternate universe" plot essentially gives you a blank check to do whatever you want plot wise - especially with animation. A good example of this are the animated Spiderverse movies. Yet, this series essentially just makes a few "tweaks" to the Tom Holland universe storyline and repackages it as a new story. They change the race of a few characters, replace a few characters, but the overall imprint of the MCU still exists. It's like the show exists in limbo between the MCU Spider-Man story and an original, creative story. The animation is okay and not very original, the characters are one-dimensional and boring, and there isn't really too much to keep the audience engaged. It seems like this should have been fleshed out a bit more before being released.