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alibi_shopThis is a dark take on superhero-team stories, especially those with an older father figure running the team as in X-Men or Doom Patrol (even though both of those have already explored the dysfunctional-family aspect of their premise pretty thoroughly), combined with "siblings who have gone very different ways reunite" as in The Royal Tenenbaums. It's also a big fate-of-the-world thriller involving time travel and a secret squad of assassins controlling destiny. That sounds like a very ambitious combination, but in practice The Umbrella Academy is kind of the opposite: it keeps those two threads separate most of the time, and generally avoids following up on side issues or giving us a sense of the larger world that's at stake.
The result is an odd mix of grandiosity and miniaturism that's held together only by its characters. Fortunately, they're interesting characters at least in theory, and the cast is pretty good. Unfortunately, the show works so hard to withhold information, and takes so many narrative shortcuts (thanks to time travel, one character manages to acquire a whole new tragic backstory in between two scenes), that I didn't really feel like I knew who I was looking at until about two-thirds of the way through the series. That's also when the plot went from "this is very confusing but I want to find out more" to "oh, I see where this is going now... is that all?", as it became clear that the world-in-peril/time-travel plot was going to crowd out almost everything else. Considering how many different mysteries are introduced in the first part of the series (some of which are never answered—for instance, why is no one at all interested in the other 36 magical kids that we're told exist?), it's kind of impressive how quickly it shifts to being unsurprising; basically, as soon as we get into the subplot involving Ellen Page's character (the only one in the family who has no powers) it's immediately obvious what her role will be in the denouement. That's not necessarily a terrible thing but it quickly leads to Page, whom I like a lot in this, becoming much less interesting due to the requirements of the plot.
The other MVPs besides Page are Robert Sheehan and Aidan Gallagher. I have fond memories of Sheehan in Misfits and he's playing a vaguely similar role here as a smartass trainwreck, but with maddeningly uneven writing so sometimes you can believe he's struggling with trauma and addiction and other times it's just a guy making jokes; still he feels human in a way that a lot of the rest of the show doesn't. Gallagher, a 15-year-old playing an elderly man who's also a super-spy who's trapped in the body of a 13-year-old, has a basically impossible task and does pretty well with it; he'll probably be a movie star. Honorable mention to David Castañeda who takes an incredibly boring and pointless character and manages to make him... still boring and pointless, but at least watchable.
The overall look of the show is pretty good, kind of Tim Burtony. There's an animated talking chimp for no reason except that he was in the comic (which I haven't read, so I have no opinion on how faithful any of this is), a nice monster design for Tom Hopper's character, and a legitimately frightening apocalypse. There's also a lot of "peppy pop song playing over a violent scene", which gets old fast for me.
I'll probably keep watching this if only because they left off on a ridiculous cliffhanger, but I spent about half of nearly every episode being very frustrated with it.
The result is an odd mix of grandiosity and miniaturism that's held together only by its characters. Fortunately, they're interesting characters at least in theory, and the cast is pretty good. Unfortunately, the show works so hard to withhold information, and takes so many narrative shortcuts (thanks to time travel, one character manages to acquire a whole new tragic backstory in between two scenes), that I didn't really feel like I knew who I was looking at until about two-thirds of the way through the series. That's also when the plot went from "this is very confusing but I want to find out more" to "oh, I see where this is going now... is that all?", as it became clear that the world-in-peril/time-travel plot was going to crowd out almost everything else. Considering how many different mysteries are introduced in the first part of the series (some of which are never answered—for instance, why is no one at all interested in the other 36 magical kids that we're told exist?), it's kind of impressive how quickly it shifts to being unsurprising; basically, as soon as we get into the subplot involving Ellen Page's character (the only one in the family who has no powers) it's immediately obvious what her role will be in the denouement. That's not necessarily a terrible thing but it quickly leads to Page, whom I like a lot in this, becoming much less interesting due to the requirements of the plot.
The other MVPs besides Page are Robert Sheehan and Aidan Gallagher. I have fond memories of Sheehan in Misfits and he's playing a vaguely similar role here as a smartass trainwreck, but with maddeningly uneven writing so sometimes you can believe he's struggling with trauma and addiction and other times it's just a guy making jokes; still he feels human in a way that a lot of the rest of the show doesn't. Gallagher, a 15-year-old playing an elderly man who's also a super-spy who's trapped in the body of a 13-year-old, has a basically impossible task and does pretty well with it; he'll probably be a movie star. Honorable mention to David Castañeda who takes an incredibly boring and pointless character and manages to make him... still boring and pointless, but at least watchable.
The overall look of the show is pretty good, kind of Tim Burtony. There's an animated talking chimp for no reason except that he was in the comic (which I haven't read, so I have no opinion on how faithful any of this is), a nice monster design for Tom Hopper's character, and a legitimately frightening apocalypse. There's also a lot of "peppy pop song playing over a violent scene", which gets old fast for me.
I'll probably keep watching this if only because they left off on a ridiculous cliffhanger, but I spent about half of nearly every episode being very frustrated with it.
