This is the second in a series of episode reviews for the animated TV show Invincible, starting from the end and working backwards. See the overview here.
Last time we found out all about the noble Saiyan race.
Finally revealed! The secret origin of Omni-man’s crazy eyes.
I was delighted in the first part of this episode to find the Dragonball comparison given yet further weight by the addition of androids to the mix. This was most pleasing, as diversionary as it felt — viewing with full knowledge of the tiny robot child’s contribution to the climactic events next episode (none).
The conclusion I’m erring towards is that there’s very little deconstruction of the superhero taking place here: there’s a fairly basic superhero teen narrative that seems awfully close to something you might have seen on Justice League or Teen Titans, and then there’s a second story that’s somewhere between John Wick and Jason Bourne about an unstoppable murderous tool of the state being controlled and managed. Perpetual CIA sad-sack Cecil comments at one point that an ineffectual orbital cannon cost several billion dollars; you’ve got to wonder how much was correspondingly spent on the Omni-man project.
The clean modern design of the Omni-mansion brings to mind John Wick.
The fighting in the episode, was merrily animated. I did appreciate Robocop-by-way-of-Evangelion’s-seagulls — and of course the mass-production Evangelions were also the secret product of a shadowy governmental clique holding them in reserve as a trump card. I was somewhat disappointed in how Omni-man was not the devastating force of nature he was made out to be in my first episode. His failure to kill Cecil, a frail man armed only with a teleporter whose previous advantage was remaining strictly remote, was particularly unimpressive. Come on! The man is untethered from all morality and has the physical strength to tear the Immortal in two, don’t have him take hits for a few minutes first.
The part-Robocop dog men were an interesting addition, especially given how closely they hew to Omni-man’s episode 8 description of how he sees humanity.
The teen drama is slightly more charming here than it was in the finale, and the sequence describing Eve’s morning routine looks delightful. I’m still not sure what to make of her statement “Looks like I’m helping you today”, which was so weighty that it featured in the “last time” sequence in the previous episode I watched.
The bulk of the episode is taken up with the alternately charming and irritating story of the boy android who did very little in episode 8. It’s a little contrived, but I think I can disentangle it: the episode begins with the (re?)introduction of a disfigured man in a life support tank, who tasks two burly clone-men with installing him in a new body they have grown for him. After some grousing they do this, at which point he immediately betrays them and attempts to imprison and/or murder them. Simultaneously, the disfigured man has been masquerading as a malfunctioning robot in the Justice League watchtower subplot, where he has formed a pseudo-romantic relationship with a woman who ages backwards. Their only reprieve is when he’s ordered by CIA Cecil to return to the base, an order which he obeys immediately. All very puzzling, and only reaffirming the space base as the locus of nauseating teen drama.
The best sequences in the episode take place in the family home and locale, a palpable sense of desperation as Omni-man shreds his connection to humanity piece by piece. The only moment missed is a reflection on his inhumanity in the flames of the exploded surveillance-house across the road — both Batman v Superman and Russell T. Davies’ The Second Coming do this scene with more gravitas.
A rare miss in the iconography for the extremely shallow, flame free crater.
This is the episode it had to be for the subsequent episode to be impactful; a measure of the existing state of affairs breaking apart piece by piece. It’s not as striking as the finale, but perhaps it can’t be.
This is the first in a series of episode reviews for the animated TV show Invincible, starting from the end and working backwards. See the overview here.
I found this episode to be a very strong opener. A pleasant surprise, and the first half of the episode was very good indeed. Over the full length of the episode some more dubious elements started to creep in, but it was very enjoyable, well animated, and extremely funny. The comic timing on the gag with the ejecting fighter pilot was sublime, giving you just long enough to groan at some laughably non-lethal supervillainry straight out of GI Joe before the fascist moustache man touches down have his full due.
The opening, forced by my malicious watching to be fully in media res, is an efficient and not too self-conscious importing of several arcs of Dragonball. The dad is a Saiyan, the son is a Saiyan, together they come from a planet of fascists who oversee a distant-but-terrifying space empire. The dad is appealing with some fairly thin fascist rhetoric to encourage his slightly weedy son, who he has accidentally raised as a committed liberal, to view everyone he has ever known and loved as somewhere between ants and dogs. Why the empire he belongs to is so enthused about welcoming a planet somewhere between ants and dogs into the peacefully into the fold remains unexplored. It’s not a great pitch, but fascists are often pretty stupid so I’m willing to let it slide — for now.
It’d be nice to see in a future season some character from the Saiyan homeworld (the word is “Viltrumite” but I won’t be typing that more than once) who can give it the full Mishima and present a properly unpleasant vision of the argument for a fascist superman in this way.
But yes, the dad’s arguments are so-so — it’d be easy and consistent for him to make an argument for a hierarchy of beings which included some modicum of respect for his wife, who he obviously has affection for in spite of his statements about longevity and perspective. Dismissing her feels like a sop to making the choice easier for his son, who in one of the best visual/audio gags in the episode he remembers as a gap-toothed youth hitting a home run in softball — by virtue of the noise/image combination of knocking several of his teeth out.
There are themes dancing in the shadows here, the notion of an individual so powerful that the most intelligent man on Earth, standing silhouetted before an array of surveillance screens, poses no more threat to him than the most intelligent ant — an individual tethered by relationships to a life he otherwise wishes to reject entirely. But for his other flaws, Dr Manhattan was not a fascist. Still, extremely promising potential for a work that overall grapples at least somewhat seriously with the legacy of Watchmen in a way that, say, Doomsday Clock did not.
The scene of the dad causing various catastrophes to happen to ‘teach’ his son the fragility of human life is a hammy delight, bringing to mind all the things you might do in an open-world video game where you consciously decouple yourself from the pretence that it’s anything other than a simulation; crashing trains and knocking down buildings. It adds a delusional edge to the dad’s atrocities, where it’s less that he is only pretending to care about human life (and as ever, we know that the power of love will come back to contradict that) and more that he believes both at once: he loves his wife and son and enjoys life on Earth, but he can choose to “remember” that none of it is real.
The only note that doesn’t quite hit is the dramatic sequence where the son attempts to rescue someone from a collapsing building and ends up holding a grizzly severed arm; it’s completely bathetic where it should be traumatic.
This looks like it could become a motif.
Beyond the father/son strife, the episode was more of a mixed bag. The spooky CIA operative is cloying, his sad-dog attitude as he manipulates and orders people to their certain death one of the more uncomfortably realistic things in the episode. That said, having him stand with several other characters and watch the action unfold on a big screen is such a naked shortcut gluing the first half of the episode to the second, cheating so that everyone already knows what they need to know.
The fact that there’s a second big screen with a second motley crew watching events unfold live takes it to absurdity. This all-too-human set of superheroes is a real weak point, at least in this episode, a bunch of sappy teen drama throwbacks who can surely only exist to get murdered for stakes in future episodes as-yet unproduced. Their presence awkwardly casts them as “real” people, in contrast to the faceless hordes wiped out by the collateral damage of the fight in the start of the episode, which almost endorses the delusional aspect of the dad’s evil-making — the structure of the episode treats some people as worthy of mention and other people as not. The line “we can at least Save People” is the worst in the episode, straight out of a theatrical show of Age of Ultron or some garbage.
I enjoyed the scene towards the end with the mother and the techno-tailor in his Iron Man CAD room, where there’s definitely a story thread potentially brewing about the humans who might welcome an alien fascism so long as it grants them relative boons. How long did the mother spend courting, dating, then happily married to a fascist? When he returns, will she forgive him?
One issue with watching the last episode is first is that there’s nowhere to subsequently go to find out what happens next, and I’m hardly going to degrade myself by reading the comic.
Like Doctor Manhattan, I am tired of superhero stories. I am tired of being caught in their tangles. But like Doctor Manhattan, I keep being drawn back into them. I’ve watched the newest Spider-man. I watched the (gorgeous, cinematic) Snyder Cut. My giant compendium of Jack Kirby stories is slowly sifting its bookmark through the 1000+ pages. Sadly though, I’m out of passion: nothing on the horizon appeals to me. Since lockdown began I haven’t even been able to impulse buy terrible DC comics at my local comic book store.
Invincible is the new Amazon-funded animated adaptation of a comic by Robert Kirkman, now (and then) most famous for writing The Walking Dead, a lengthy comic and subsequent TV show about a cast of characters escaping from zombie onslaughts. As The Walking Dead is not about superheroes, I’ve never watched or read it, and can offer no further insight.
I’ve also never read Invincible, though I’m loosely aware of it as a mid-2000s example of the kind of hyper-violent adult ‘deconstructions’ of the superhero that Image used to publish all the time. Image now publishes an unyielding array of slightly twee, often still violent indie comics and the busy work of making loose analogues of treasured characters from your youth do hate crimes is now handled in-house by the big two, Marvel and DC.
I’m also aware that Invincible’s animated adaptation has been fairly well received, spawning one (1) successful meme and lots of hushed, maybe even muted praise. My stance going into this could best be described as skeptical. I’m struggling to think what an animated adaptation of a comic from the mid-2000s could possibly have to say as regards ‘deconstructing superheroes’ that wasn’t screamed until throats were hoarse in the mid-2000s. Or the mid-1980s. It’s not-so-much “not fertile ground” as it is a barren wasteland of ossified pop culture remains, a salt plain devoid of all but the most transitive life.
So what happened is, I saw a tweet — just a joke floating in the aether, I won’t link it — where someone was berating a (possibly fictional) friend of theirs for accidentally watching the show, which is apparently full of tense, dramatic twists and revelations, in reverse episode order. Starting with the climax and working backwards, like you used to be able to do before TV got all these pretensions towards serial narrative.
I thought “I’m going to do that.” I’m unlikely to watch the show otherwise and the thought of deliberately mashing up the structure of one of those shows where people implore you to “go in blind” appeals hugely to my irritating, antagonistic contrarian nature. This is what we mean, properly, when we say that the experience of art is subjective: some people out there are just deliberately doing it wrong, purely to screw with you, and because of that nothing gets to be objectively true ever again.
So I took a weekend and watched each episode in turn, backwards, and wrote up my thoughts. And here we are.
There is a series of article-essays by Jean Baudrillard called, collectively, “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” where the continental philosopher discusses the way in which the mediation of the first Gulf War into images and live TV news constructed a simulated war. This fake war only took place in the perception of viewing audiences, who witnessed a full, proper and dramatic conflict through stories which were essentially fictional. In actuality, Baudrillard claims, the US military essentially walked to Baghdad unopposed, the Iraqi inability to engage in air combat having completely foreclosed on the potential for an actual war. What actually occurred was a pointless, brutal atrocity which would have caused popular discontent had it be represented accurately. The simulation was essential to preserving the image of a free, fair state doing good in the world.
It is unclear whether or not the YouTube critic Dan Olson, in his video “The Snyder Cut does not exist”, was consciously referencing the aforementioned work by Baudrillard. He’s a sharp and well-read guy, so it may well have been intended as such. However, it is increasingly clear that the analogy is over-accurate: there is a fatal simulacrum in play, but it is not the image of the perfect movie in the eyes of the fans or some such triviality. Like most fans of modern pop culture, members of the Snyder Cut movement will likely expect all positive qualities from the released film and be, in some way, disappointed by the end result. But indeed, the advertising campaigns ran for these big modern blockbusters practically make it their goal to induce such projection, up to and including within the movies themselves — consider the much-derided ‘girl power’ sequence in Avengers Endgame: the realisation of the event could never have been satisfying, but it lent anticipation to the entire feature-length Captain Marvel movie before it.
No, the interesting fiction in this scenario is that monolithic conception of movies, the movie industry, movie analysis and movie twitter in the perception of people who don’t want the Snyder Cut and are forced, in their own miniature recreation of the pressures on the architects of the Gulf War, to construct a simulation that explains their bizarre, continued level of effort opposing the production of a single film — and why their authority over the subject of movies comprehensively failed to predict its existence.
Why would you not want a movie to exist, barring cases where the production of the movie would cause material harm? The option to not watch it is a near-universal right. To performatively disavow a movie is to try and say something about yourself, typically a claim to privileged knowledge or good taste. Michael Bay movies, you say, are beneath me. They might be objectively speaking popular, but I am initiated in the rules of being a Good Cinema Fan, whereby we do not like Michael Bay films (of course, as this becomes a popularly held position, the opposite starts to signify an even more refined taste; they’re ‘so bad they’re good.’)
The works of Zack Snyder, broadly speaking, fall into this category. Properly initiated film buffs, particularly leftist film buffs, know that they are not to like Zack Snyder. There is no uniformity in this dislike — which is one of the tells that it is being actively constructed. They cannot agree which of the films are not bad, which of the films are very bad, and which of the films are actively evil in some way, but they nevertheless agree on the overall point: he is a bad director, whom you must doubly disavow: his films are not enjoyable, and even if they were, you ought not to enjoy them. The development of this conviction is performed in a manner akin to numerology; we are to ignore the basic content of the films and focus exclusively on fringe inferences. A film about zombies in suburban America becomes an anti-Muslim screed based on a half-second in a montage. A film where a man risks everything to save humanity becomes a Randian tract. A satire about baby-murdering Stormtroopers becomes a non-ironic statement of intent. If this paranoia about the minutiae of films seems incoherent, well, it can only be a reflection of the incoherence of this fool director himself.
Under this fiction, the realisation of the failure of such a Director can only ever be postponed. Box office disappointments, rather than being a fact of life for big-budget filmmakers, are the inevitable reconciliation of the Director’s failings. Internal corporate movement becomes a morality play rather than petty workplace strife. Where the Director succeeds, it is by accident. Where they fail, it is fate.
The existence of the Snyder Cut is a rupture into this fictional world, potentially throwing the whole thing into doubt. Snyder’s films have fans, and so are not universally held to be unpopular. Those fans have weight with the studio, so they must be significant in number. The movement raised money for charity and seems generally diverse if apolitical — it is not associated with the right. The original release of Justice League is so obviously lacking in quality that little meaningful attempt has been made to redeem it against a future ‘worse’ Snyder Cut. Having set the boundaries of a world where Snyder cannot possibly succeed, the leading figures in this loose movement are forced to explain what has gone so terribly wrong.
And so the Snyder Cut itself, and all of its fans, must be replaced by a series of simulacra. The original cut cannot have existed: instead of the simple fact of a box of film reels, there is the image of Snyder himself performing a catalysing deception, stringing fans along on a hopeless crusade that will never see success. In place of a film director happy to be allowed to finish a project, there must be a scam artist, ill intent behind his every motive. Will he trick the fans, lying about reshoots that will never take place? Will he trick the film studio into spending money on a doomed project? Or is he producing malevolent propaganda for his Ayn Rand views by hiding it in mass media? Take your pick. In place of a small popular movement which funded a few billboards and flyovers, as well as raising a modest amount for charity, there is an organised harassment campaign that we have a moral duty to stand against to the bitter end. And, most ridiculously, the movie studio, rather than participating in funding an (albeit unusual) project they expect a certain amount of success from, has been hoodwinked and lead into grave danger because they did not pay enough attention to the warnings of Twitter film personalities.
“Zack Snyder has tricked Warner Brothers into spending an outrageous amount of money on a movie no-one want except right-wing maniacs” is the ridiculous line we are expected to believe, requiring us to — merely — suspend our disbelief that a single director can pressure an entire movie studio, that a modest production budget is a moral outrage, and that the organised right are wasting their time procuring a four-hour cut of Justice League. And for what? So that we can maintain the image of a world where having the correct taste in pop culture can decide whether or not we are good people.
The “Snyder Cut”, as discussed online, is a fictional object loaded with every meaning up to and including the success of evil over goodness. Each new development, each step in the marketing cycle of leaking news, has to be met with the same level of incredulity. Budget news is more spurious waste. Casting news is more people tricked aboard a sinking ship. Filming news is more proof that the original promise was a lie — and if the people actually anticipating the film don’t see it that way, it’s more evidence that they’re credulous idiots. So the Snyder Cut will not exist. The Snyder Cut does not exist. And post the release of the film next year, expect eagerly to hear that the Snyder Cut did not exist.
