A cartoon of a TV show. The comic tone of the show doesn't so much undermine the toxic ideology of white supremacy as in Jojo Rabbit but instead provide a simple, comfortable, palatable bad guy. The comedy, however weak, provides a cover for ignoring the complexity of the evil it touches.
The spy drama is like a see-saw, where the advantage shifts from one side or the other, but there is no real sense of struggle when the balance shifts, and no sense that the victories are earned. Each complex challenge has an easy solution.
As for the personal drama, Hanna herself is also not a particularly compelling main character. I would have expected a greater sense of excitement (whether wonder or fear) when the girl who grew up in the wilderness finally rode her first vehicle, or saw her first TV or listened to her first mp3, but she mostly takes it all in stride. Hell, even as awkward as she is, she's still far too comfortable around other people given her extreme lack of interpersonal experience. There isn't a sense of how deeply this incredible background should have shaped her or the difficulty she should be facing in overcoming it.
Really impressed by some of the casting in this show: Brendan Fraser, Timothy Dalton, Alan Tudyk.
It commits a lot of time to explaining how useless and worthless the characters are as they bumble their way through the plot.
Overall, the show has a vindictive, bleak and juvenile tone to it, while also being somewhat restrained, full of edgy jokes that feel like they've emerged from the pen of a teenager who's afraid to be too edgy lest they offend their mother.
For example, there is "Crazy Jane" whose superpower revolves around her multiple personality disorder who gets to provide the wish fulfilment of doing something like, violently stapling a poster to someone's head, but doesn't have to deal with the moral complexity of that action because it was just her "bitch personality" doing it. In fact, 3 out of the 4 heroes in the original group (all but the protagonist) have superpowers that practically have personalities of their own, therefore justifying a wide range of out-of-character actions on the basis that "their superpower did the bad thing". The bad thing is played for a bit of drama or a joke and then we move on and forget about it because the thing they did wasn't on purpose.
On the matter of vindictiveness, it's a little worrying that the mental illnesses experienced by many of the characters are just framed as character-defining quirks belonging to "losers" and not as, like, genuine mental illnesses in need of professional treatment.
In the end, my experience is that the show is watchable but kind of boring and shallow.
A few flaws presented themselves right from the outset.
First of all, the show is Stargirl, not Starman. Why does it start with an action scene revolving around Starman's death instead of starting with Courtney, the girl who will be Stargirl?
Secondly, it's not clear why Starman is such a dick to his trusted and heroic sidekick Pat. Immediately after Pat runs into an exploding building and rescues him, Starman waxes on how he needs someone ACTUALLY heroic to inherit his powers. Of course, the real reason is just that the staff is not compatible with him. Surely it'd be easier to just say that instead of dissing your best friend on your deathbed. Perhaps the compatibility issue will be clarified as a bit of a Thors Hammer "worthiness" scenario, but if so it's still not clear how Courtney is any more qualified than Pat aside from simply being Starman's daughter.
Moreover, if they wanted to say that Starman is heroic, perhaps they could heve spent his screentime showing how heroic he really is?
Thirdly, what were the villains trying to do 10 years ago that was so important it needed to be shown to us steaight away? After the villains defeated the heroes 10 years ago, what have they been doing? Just sitting around and scheming it seems. (And apparently also raising a child in their eeeeevil mansion.)
They set up a (boring) character arc for Courtney where she would have to learn to accept her new stepfather. But then that arc is resolved halfway into the first episode -- not through character growth but simply when she is presented with an opportunity to blackmail her new stepfather (but I suppose she's only blackmailing him "heroically"). Following that, there's no character arc provided for her. Overall, the only real conflict is external, and we're never given any sense of the stakes.
Just in general, the writing is terrible and the acting is unconvincing.
After the first episode, I had deep concerns about this series. It starts with a pretty cool and funny origin story for the members of the Umbrella Academy but it spends little time addressing the question of who these people are. (Sure, you get plenty of information about "what" they are. One's a drug addict, one's an astronaut, one's a celebrity, etc.)
In the end, the show has so little faith in our attention span that it has to tell us the central plot, like something ripped from the Heroes TV show, a time traveller announces that the world will end in a few days and they don't know how it will happen but they have to stop it.
There are no personal stakes. It is action packed, but the action lacks context. The weight of their actions (such as murder of a group of bank robbers) lacks gravity or consequences. And the bland, confident, sarcastic attitudes of the characters is out of place in what should be dramatic, life changing moments. Hell, their long lost brother, who has been a missing person for more than a decade, suddenly returns and... Everyone just acts like he's just returned from a holiday or something. Seriously!? Additionally, from his perspective he's spent like 30 years away from his family and away from anything resembling civilization until he finally achieved backwards timetravel and... His emotional response is that he is a bit annoyed that he gets to be young again.
The problems didn't end there. More and more it seems like among every character in the show, there isn't a single human who is able to have a single human emotion.
This show is basically a modern version of Buffy.
I feared it would be overly Christian but it wasn't. It's about as religious as you'd expect any TV show about Shaolin monks would be.
I enjoyed that it wasn't constantly focused on spectacle for the sake of spectacle and is solidly character-driven. I enjoyed how it took the time to explore the humanity of most of the characters (including villains) and there are moments you question whether certain characters are really going to develop into true antagonists.
The plot isn't always surprising, and not always perfectly executed (an example being where a demon just stands around holding an impaled Lilith while Ava decides to pick up a sword), but its characters are always thoroughly believable and the action is visually quite appealing.
This was a very pleasant surprise.
I find myself watching people bicker about the distinction between drizzle and rain with no hint of subtext or irony in a TV show ostensibly about politics.
This is a poor substitute for watching a better made show like The Crown.
The assassin just... loiters with a stupid smirk. Putting her fingerprints on everything. Waiting for someone to walk in on her assassination. She's bound to have been walking past numerous security cameras on her way in and out of these locations as well.
Her particular brand of psychopathy doesn't make her intimidating or intriguing. It just seems to make her bland and shallow and worst of all, inefficient.
Yes, there are people hiding some of the evidence for her, but that hardly serves her reputation as a master assassin. It's awfully convenient that her greatest achievements (such as killing a witness, two armed guards and a nurse silently in a hospital) all take place off screen.
Meanwhile, Eve is selected as the head of the taskforce not because she's collecting any of the ample amount of evidence being left behind by the assassin, but because she strings together theories based on gut feelings. You're telling me no ONE thought to check the hospital staff roster until Eve had an epiphany days later?
I had high hopes for this series, but it was a bit of a let down.
It lacks grounding. The fights aren't really that exciting and rely on certain characters having superpowers that allow them to survive despite their stupidity. In fact, it's almost like they're powered by their stupidity. Like Thorkell, who fights for the sake of fighting and says he likes being on the "losing side" for a challenge.
The philosophy is broken. And the plot moves very, very slowly.
If someone walks in on you watching this, then switch to some porn. It'll probably be less awkward.
Definitely a very ecchi story, but is there any substance hidden beneath the silly premise? Unfortunately not much. It's almost a parody when you hear a character pleading to learn the secret of the "Vacuum Butt Cannon" technique. Almost.
In the end it takes itself too seriously when it's being stupid, and not seriously enough when it has the chance to do some real storytelling.
Convenient and kind of mediocre. After trying the first episode, I wasn't convinced it would be worth giving the rest of the show a chance.
The character writing starts off pretty well, with drama is pretty basic, and Cha's relationship with his nephew is a great set-up, but it's unable to maintain this level of strong writing.
The spycraft isn't all that impressive. In order to cover up a phone call to the airport police call centre reporting a vague threat against the airplane, the bad guys immediately set off a fire alarm and within seconds, before there's a chance for anyone to talk about anything, there are call centre operators screaming in the hallways (these are supposedly trained police officers too!) and the operator who handled the call is assassinated before she can tell anyone. How do they know who took the call? If they're capable of all that, wouldn't it have been easier to just cut off the call? Nah. Murdering a police officer in plain sight is easier. Plus the assassin looked pretty cool!
Also, how can you freeze what looks like be a 5L cylinder of compressed oxygen by spraying it with maybe 500mL of liquid nitrogen? Why would freezing it increase the pressure inside the cylinder? Why does this make the cylinder explode like a bomb? How did the explosion take out the engine of a plane? Why is Cha immune to gravity?
An absurd premise (as if adding machines to boxing would make it more interesting), but the animation is a beautiful classic style, the music is great and the storytelling is exciting.
While the boxing matches are definitely beautiful to watch, the show struggles with the challenge of making the challenge of the boxing matches themselves exciting. We generally have to rely on drama surrounding the boxing matches to drive the tension in the story, while the combat itself is actually not important. The creators definitely recognise this: we never even learn the outcome of the final match and they didn't give us any reason to care. It's still a great story regardless, but it is robbed of some of its potential by its failure to invest in its core premise.
It further undermines its own premise of "mechanised boxing" when "Junk Dog" aka "Gearless Joe" decides to fight with the gimmick of not using the machines that are the signature of this anime. On the one hand, this is a reminder that machine-enhancement is completely unnecessary for a boxing match, but on the flip side, if the machines did have any purpose then they would be turning ordinary boxers into murder machines.
But putting aside the lack of commitment to its premise, it's pretty entertaining.
It's a cute anime that's entertaining to watch, but it relies way too much on coincidence and it kind of rushes the ending.
The title of the anime is very misleading. Nothing matters here except for the romance plot. There is no "recovery". There is no exploration of the shortcomings of her lifestyle. (As a gamer, I would have liked a more critical portrayal of the game's microtransaction and loot box mechanics in particular.) There is no exploration of the circumstances that caused her to become a NEET and/or MMO Junkie. All we get is passing comments to the effect that her job was a little stressful, apparently? I thought we were going to find out that she'd been sexually harassed? Or more detail about how demanding her employers were (perhaps a critical look at Japanese work culture?) Never happens! Even in the end of the series, it seems she's still both a NEET and an MMO Junkie.
The romantic plot is the only aspect to receive any kind of resolution, and even then it's only kind of half-assed. The only conclusion is they start holding hands. This is a moment that could have emotional weight but not in the way it's portrayed. They don't even acknowledge themselves as dating at the end. There's no real struggle. Just a series of increasingly unlikely coincidences that lead to the romantic outcome.
Overall, it's not a bad time, but there's a lot of wasted potential and in the end it feels a bit like a hollow piece of marketing.
Cute idea, with a few funny moments, but oddly it seems to take itself a bit too seriously. Instead of a comedy, it ended up being more of a pervy shounen anime with a silly premise.
It's pretty fun in the beginning, and it's nice to see the humanising of all of these fantasy creatures, and Rimuru's absurd over-poweredness is more entertaining than you'd expect but later in the series (after the Orc Demon Lord) it seems to get distracted from the central plot and lose its sense of direction. After that, not much is really added by the end of the first season.
Hopefully the second season brings it back on track.
Overall, I respect this show for what it is and the themes it presents. However, it has a more filler and exposition than I'd like to stretch out the core story. It is also quite immature and some of the character motivations are overly simplistic and boring.
Perhaps better for a young adult audience rather than myself.
I'm a fan of Terry Pratchett's books, including this collaboration with Neil Gaiman. Unfortunately, this is yet another adaptation that demonstrates that Pratchett's talent for writing doesn't easily translate to the screen. They try their best -- yet again, by having a narrator read out key bits of exposition lifted from the book -- but no matter the talent involved here, the jokes just never land as potently as they did in the book. Key moments, like the decision to call his dog, "Dog" fail to earn a smirk from me. The scene of Crowley's plants shivering in fear is not only a distraction from the plot of the show, but it also feels like something out of a children's cartoon.
If you enjoy Terry Pratchett's work, then just read the book.
This anime sets up some great concepts but seems to have a lot of trouble following through effectively. The Shield Hero is unable to wield any weapons, making him practically useless offensively. (Although how does that work exactly? What if he picks up something like a baseball bat? The rules for this are glossed over.)
At first he seems to overcome this weakness by carrying around weak monsters he can use as weapons. Secondly, he manages to form a companionship with someone who can provide him with offense. Then we start seeing hints that he would find creative ways of using "defensive" powers in an offensive way. Okay. I'm intrigued. But instead of building on this, his weakness just gets kind of forgotten and he just starts getting powers that are explicitly offensive. He doesn't even have to learn a valuable lesson to earn these attacks. He just gets them because he got a bit angry one time. Yay~
There are also some very strange story moments. For example, his two main companions are enslaved to him by a "curse" placed on them. Even though they are perfectly willing to follow him (and crush on him constantly -- of course they're both part of his loli harem), for some reason it was necessary to magically enslave them. One of them is even said to be put through a lot of pain just in order to have this curse applied. This is our (anti)hero torturing and enslaving people he actually likes -- for no reason! It's just weird.
The moment that really made me lose interest in this series is in episode 13 when some random soldiers have what is essentially a magic video camera, to record the shield hero's team defending themselves against some soldiers. THEN this video footage is essentially photoshopped to make it look like they're having a murder spree. THEN they use a magic TV projector to wander around the country showing this footage to all the common people to show how nasty he is. The lazy ways in which the Shield Hero is constantly getting set up as a bad guy just boggles my mind.
Overall, it's been kind of awkward and lazy. On the plus side, adult Raphtalia is pretty cute, and I felt the series was strongest when it just focused on them as a pair (though she's still technically underage, ugh).
I quite enjoy Josh Thomas's stand up and this series came to me highly recommended.
However, this show lacks the energy of a stand up routine so with long slow periods between jokes that aren't worth the wait. This is not a comedy. It is first and foremost a drama, but it's hard when there's no sense of direction. The story moments just seem to happen without appearing to fit within any story or character arcs.
For example, the series starts with the end of Josh's last heterosexual relationship. Is the story arc about how he finds a new relationship? Nope. Next story beat he gets a boyfriend. Is the story arc about how he (and the people around him) cope with the realisation that he's gay? Nope. A couple quick jokes and everyone (Josh included) immediately accepts his homosexuality. Every time it appears like an interesting arc is being set up, it immediately fizzles out.
It lost my interest half way through the first episode, and although I endured watching until the end of the second episode, I was not rewarded for my persistence.
It has some interesting concepts, but the leading male is a bland, unlikeable character. And the leading female becomes unrelatable just because she is obsessed with him for no reason. It became unwatchable after a couple of episodes.
I also think it would have been more interesting is the "deal with the devil" premise came with some uncomfortable consequences that were actually meaningful, and not just the stupid, "virgin man is too shy to kiss a pretty woman he likes even though she is literally begging him to kiss her".
It has some interesting concepts and in some ways it's great that it tries to take a complex view of themes such as slavery and religion and the part these play in war. However, in the end this seems to boil down to being a series of impactful and thematic moments that fit the themes, but the TV show doesn't do the work to fully justify those moments and weave them into the story. Many characters seem far too two-dimensional as a result.
A great example of this is Kharlan, who betrays Andragoras out of loyalty to the true heir Silver Mask. He burns Parsian villages and sell out his country to Lucitania, and risks his own title as a lord... For what benefit? Why is his loyalty to Silver Mask so important that he's willing to give up practically every other principle he has? In addition, why are his own soldiers so eager to follow him in this when he's kept his loyalties a secret from them too? These motivations are not explored in the TV series.
What I expected was a mature, gritty version of Sabrina The Teenage Witch. What I got was a very political, very Christian, horror-themed version of Sabrina that still seems targeted specifically at a teenage demographic.
Is it just me, or was the original TV series accidentally progressive for showing an alternative non-Christian lifestyle in a positive light? This new series seems to undermine the progressiveness of its source material by re-imagining this non-Christian lifestyle as explicit devil-worshipping, where witches routinely commit murder and cannibalism. Sabrina's own aunt Zelda expresses disappointment about missing out on an opportunity to eat "long-pig".
The story also seems to take a few pages from Harry Potter with Sabrina being persecuted by pure-blood witches for being half-Muggle and it even has its evil version of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. It actually really feels like it is a knee-jerk reaction to the popularity of Harry Potter; a story with a protagonist whose challenge is to resist the temptation of evil witchcraft.
Finally, why do they have to refer to everything as "dark"? When Sabrina tells Harvey about her "dark baptism", maybe it would have sounded a lot less crazy if she'd just called it a "baptism"? It's like listening to Dr Evil (from Austin Powers) explain how he got his M.D. in "evil medical school". There's absolutely no subtlety to be had here.
First of all, this is not a crime show. This is a slice of life drama that just happens to star a group of cops. The crimes don't matter. All that matters is the relationship between the team members and how they feel. That could be great if it's done well, but it's underwhelming here.
It appears they're trying to present an idealised idea of being a cop. Like the job is something out of an action movie where the cops are the heroes and their office is a kind of bootcamp, where superiors demean and bully their underlings (even in front of criminals).
At one point in the first episode, one supervisor (as a kind of twisted hazing ritual) deliberately sets his rookie up to be attacked by a drug dealer (lucky he didn't have a knife or something), and then stands and watches, smugly, while his rookie is receiving punches. Yet, by the end of the same episode I'm supposed to feel sympathetic for that supervisor? No, thank you.
This TV show just seems to be about people meandering around acting miserable and awkward.
The world is meant to be a weird reflection on reality. But it has some ideas that were so goofball that I had to stop for a few moments to comprehend what was supposed to be happening on-screen. Like "Ad Buddy", which in this story is a way to pay for a service by having a real physical actor approach you and just read advertisements out to you one-on-one. The world-building (which seems to be the main focus of the first couple of episodes) is extremely shallow. The world really makes zero sense.
I like to imagine this show is going somewhere but I'm already bored and I've checked out.
It's just hard to tell if the creators of this show have ever seen a TMNT TV show or movie before. Every single character presented in this new show are so different from their previous characterisations that it makes you wonder why they choose to call it Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. (In this version, everyone is characterised as an over-eager, snarking buffoon.)
If you can forget that these are supposed to be the ninja turtles, then maybe you'll be able to find something to like about it.
In many ways, it's a very inspired TV show that pushes pushes you to be the best you can be with great characters and a great story .
The transition into the second half when it begins the second arc is a bit jarring and a bit of a drag at first, but it leads into some of the best moments of the series.
I really feel this has been let down by the lecherousness of its creators. Overall, the adult content is probably worthy of nothing more than a PG rating, and I'd be comfortable with explicit content if it were handled well. Instead, sexuality is treated extremely immaturely with Simon's face constantly inadvertantly finding its way into cleavage and it's just an annoying distraction from the otherwise great story.
