VisionQuest review – Marvel’s latest TV show feels like it could have been made by a computer
Paul Bettany stars in a WandaVision spinoff that’s a visually striking, genre-bending package – of fighting and tediously wordy dialogue. What an odd confection
Martin Scorsese compared them to theme parks. Nicolas Cage likened them to WWE. The products of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – 38 films, 18 television shows and counting – are not generally well regarded as works of art. This is understandable: they are derivative, corporate and also somewhat mechanical – not just in their CGI-heavy production or phased rollouts, but in their preoccupations, with robotics, technological combat, complex webs of association. This is not the cinema, per Scorsese, “of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”
The MCU doesn’t just gravitate towards cliche in this area, it barely features actual humans at all. And yet – like a superhero searching for a special stone – you get the sense that Marvel will not rest until such profundity is within its grasp. Unlike rollercoasters or wrestling, the MCU can be quite intellectually demanding: why shouldn’t it be capable of illuminating truths about the human condition as well?
VisionQuest, Marvel’s latest TV offering, seems to harbour such ambitions. It sees The Vision, a synthezoid, reckoning with the concept of selfhood: what does it mean to be humanesque? It’s a timely question, and VisionQuest is a visually striking, formally experimental and eclectically genre-bending package for it. Yet it is also a shouty, fighty blockbuster that retains everything – particularly the labyrinthine plotting – that has long made comic book fare such an artistic turn-off.
For a start, it is mired in lore. Scrolling through Disney+ a couple of weeks ago, I was warned that I needed to watch seven different films and TV shows to prepare for VisionQuest’s release. It’s a lot of homework (the dog ate mine), but there really is no point tuning in without having seen its direct prequel, WandaVision. That’s OK because the 2021 series – the MCU’s most creatively successful offering – is a bit of a masterpiece; a beautiful and thrilling psychological portrait of the Scarlet Witch, whose grief for her vanquished paramour Vision leads her to magically resurrect him via a chronologically evolving pastiche of American sitcoms.
Inevitably, even WandaVision had to descend into standard superhero drivel at some point. VisionQuest is a spin-off with roots in such drivel, which involved Wanda’s Vision battling a reassembled version of his original body called The Vision (great name for a slick-fringed 1980s synthpop band). But then they made friends, and magical Vision planted his memories into his replacement, who duly fled.
To, we discover, an Edinburgh pub, which Vision once frequented with Wanda. Desperate to connect with his forebear who he sees as more human, The Vision (Paul Bettany, doing a nicely beta English gent thing) now works at said boozer in his visually mortal form. But instead of going home at night, he slips into the walk-in fridge and reverts to his real robot self. And then we go inside his mind.
Or whatever the AI equivalent of a mind is. Here it’s a houseshare with five other AIs, each given humanoid form and each with a specialism that helps The Vision, including social secretary Friday and defence expert E.D.I.T.H. We also have a wildly bearded James Spader as Ultron, Vision’s evil-ish maker who previously attempted to wipe out humanity.
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This is the basic setup. Now for the story. A bounty hunter is after The Vision (in a laughably unlikely twist, his hacker-style assistant is played by Diane Morgan) and, in order to lure him into his clutches, tracks down a teenager called Thomas who claims to be possessed by the spirit of one of Wanda and Vision’s magical twins. The Vision and Thomas meet and flee together, meaningful father-son bond still pending.
That’s about one quarter of the plot. VisionQuest goes on to merge the fallout from WandaVision with an Ultron deep dive and an entirely different narrative about another robot. A huge amount of exposition is involved, and the AI-on-AI dialogue is tediously wordy (Ultron could get permanent residency in Pseuds Corner; at one point he marvels at “the unalgorithmic alacrity with which [humans] wobble”). Technically, that’s to the script’s credit – this is essentially a show about computer systems in conversation – but it still feels off-puttingly uncanny, like something AI really could manifest in the near future. The fusion of indie road trip movie, Matrix-like thriller, murder mystery and irreverent superhero dramedy, meanwhile, also feels like a computer’s idea of interesting art.
VisionQuest is sometimes entertaining and always clever, yet if it does have anything to say about human nature, it is drowned out by dizzying plot particulars and the need for a big brawl every episode. Yet what’s really missing is actual jeopardy: it turns out to be quite difficult to emotionally invest in lines of code that exist in the “head” of an android. This isn’t dumb, mindless entertainment, but VisionQuest is still closer to the Big Dipper than GoodFellas.
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