VisionQuest Review: Marvel's Latest TV Show Looks Like It Could Have Been Made by a Computer
Paul Bettany stars in the WandaVision spin-off, which is visually dazzling but wrapped in a genre package of combative, tedious dialogue. Martin Scorsese compared the Marvel shows to theme parks, a strangely sweet comparison. Nicolas Cage likened them to WWE. Marvel Cinematic Universe products (38 films, 18 TV shows, and many more) are generally not considered works of art. This is understandable: it
Martin Scorsese compared them to theme parks. Nicolas Cage compared them to WWE. The products of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — 38 movies, 18 TV shows, and counting — aren't generally considered works of art. This is understandable: they are derivative, corporate, and also somewhat mechanistic—not just in their CGI-heavy production or stage presentation, but in their preoccupations with robotics, technological battles, complex webs of association. According to Scorsese, this is not the cinema of humans who want to convey emotional and psychological experiences to another human being.
The MCU doesn't just go for the cliché in this regard, it hardly ever shows real humans. And yet—like a superhero in search of a special stone—you get the sense that Marvel won't rest until it has such depth. Unlike a rollercoaster or a ship, the MCU can be quite intellectually demanding: why shouldn't it also be able to illuminate truths about the human condition?
VisionQuest, Marvel's latest TV offering, seems to harbor such ambitions. Sees Vision, a synthezoid, who reckons with the concept of selfhood: What does it mean to be a humanist? It's a timely question, and VisionQuest is a striking, formally experimental, genre-bending visual package for it. Still, it's a blockbuster and a war movie that retains everything — especially the labyrinthine plot — that has long made comic books so artistic.
For starters, it's steeped in science. Browsing Disney Plus a few weeks ago, I was warned that I would need to watch seven different movies and TV shows to prepare for the release of VisionQuest. That's a lot of homework (the dog ate my homework), but it's no use without seeing its direct prequel, WandaVision. That's good because the 2021 series — the MCU's most creative offering — is a bit of a masterpiece. A beautiful and haunting psychological portrait of the Scarlet Witch, whose grief for the Vision's defeated character leads her to revive magic through a time-evolving pastiche of American sitcoms.
Inevitably, even WandaVision had to land on the standard superhero drive at some point. VisionQuest is a spin-off rooted in such drives, which involved Wanda's Vision battling a version of her original body called The Vision (a great name for a 1980s synthpop band). But then they made friends and the magical Vision implanted his memories in his replacement who escaped in time.
We discover a pub in Edinburgh, where Vision used to hang out with Wanda. Desperate to connect with his ancestor, whom he sees as more human, Vision (Paul Bettany doing a nice Beta English job) now works in this drink in his visual mortal form. But instead of going home at night, he goes into the fridge and reverts to his true robot self. And then we go inside his mind.
or whatever artificial intelligence is equivalent to the mind. It's home to five other AIs, each in humanoid form and each with specialties that help The Vision, including Social Minister Friday and Defense Expert E.D.I.T.H. We also have a wildly bearded James Spader as Ultron, Vision's evil creator who previously tried to destroy humanity.
This is the default setting. Now for the story. A bounty hunter is on the hunt for The Vision (in an unlikely twist, his hacker-style sidekick is played by Diane Morgan) and, in order to capture him, tracks down a teenager named Thomas, who claims to be possessed by the spirit of one of Wanda and Vision's magical twins. Vision and Thomas meet and run away together, a meaningful father-son bond still hanging in the balance.
This is about a quarter of the plot. VisionQuest continues to merge the results of WandaVision with an Ultron deep dive and a completely different narrative about another robot. There's a huge amount of drama involved, and the AI-on-AI dialogue is tiresome (Eltron manages to get permanent residency in Pseuds Corner; at one point he marvels at the "non-algorithmic grandeur with which [humans] rock"). Technically, it's to the script's credit—it's basically a show about computer systems talking—but it still feels weird, like something AI could actually show up in the near future. At the same time, a mash-up of indie road trip film, Matrix thriller, murder mystery and superhero drama Irreverence, the idea of a computer art also seems interesting.
VisionQuest is sometimes entertaining and always clever, but if it has anything to say about human nature, it gets lost in the dizzying plot detail and need for a big brawl every episode. What's really missing, though, is the real danger: It seems too difficult to get emotionally invested in the lines of code that exist in an Android's "head." It's not silly, mindless fun, but VisionQuest is still closer to the Big Dipper than GoodFellas.