FX's Legion (February 2017)

[sternrogers01]

Premiers February 8th

["Cane Dewey" Johnson]

I'm surprised more people aren't talking about this show. I'm actually really excited for it, at least compared to most of Marvel TV's output.

Reviews are starting to come out.

tvline.com/2017/01/17/legion-review-fx-marvel-comics-superhero-dan-stevens/

Legion Review: An Exhilarating Delight, Even if You Don't Like Comic Books

I know what you’re thinking: Another comic-book show? From The CW’s crowded superhero stable to Netflix’s Daredevil/Jessica Jones/Luke Cage trio, it seems like every other TV drama these days springs from the panels of a comic book. And yet, thankfully, there’s still room for a fresh voice in there, because FX’s Legion is not just “another comic-book show.” Visually inventive and emotionally astute, it bursts out of the gate with the most exhilarating TV pilot I’ve seen since Mr. Robot.

The bulk of the credit for Legion — debuting Wednesday, Feb. 8 at 10/9c — goes to creator Noah Hawley, who proved he can revitalize a franchise with FX’s Fargo. As he did there, Hawley uses the original Legion comic books not as a strict blueprint, but as a jumping-off point to create his own universe — one splashed with light, sound and color. Legion not only doesn’t look like any other superhero show; it doesn’t look like anything else on TV. And that’s a good thing.

The story centers on David Haller (Downton Abbey‘s Dan Stevens), a troubled young man trapped in a bleak mental institution. We learn through flashbacks that he had a rough upbringing spiked with violent outbursts, and has now been placed on a numbing pill regimen. But the arrival of a new patient named Syd (Fargo‘s Rachel Keller) awakens something in him, and he starts to realize that all of his psychological problems might just be his extraordinary abilities fighting to get out.

As we learn, David is a mutant with massive telepathic and telekinetic powers; one observer calls him “the most powerful mutant we’ve ever encountered.” (In the original Marvel comics, David is the son of Professor X, of X-Men fame.) The government fears the damage that his powers could inflict, and looks to “kill him now, before he knows what he is.” But David manages to connect with a team of allies who can help him unlock his potential.

There’s some incredible CGI on display here, including a stunningly elaborate battle scene at the very end of the pilot. But most of Legion‘s eye-candy comes from the gorgeous cinematography and set design, filmed by Hawley with a precision reminiscent of Kubrick and Wes Anderson. Legion‘s pilot is bathed in bold primary colors and filled with inspired song choices like the Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow” and the Who’s “Happy Jack.” It may be too stylized for some, but for those on its particular wavelength (like me), it’s an absolute tour de force.

David and Syd’s romance is essential to the story; it gives us something tangible to lean on amid all the mutant weirdness. Their unique courtship, with her not wanting to be touched and him respectfully keeping his distance, is oddly charming. (She agrees to hold a piece of fabric he’s holding so they can “hold hands.”) And Stevens’ performance helps give the show some emotional heft, as David battles with his inner demons. The supporting cast is loaded, too: Aubrey Plaza is wonderfully mischievous as David’s nutso pal Lenny, and Mackenzie Grey is an instant-classic villain as “The Eye,” a silent henchman with a glass eye and a Phil Spector perm who ominously whittles in the background.

Admittedly, Legion‘s plot gets a bit confusing at times, with “memory glitches,” body switches and random time jumps. But it helps that David is just as confused as we are; he acts as our surrogate, and we figure out how this strange new world works along with him. And after the relentless flash and pizzazz of the pilot, Episode 2 gives us a much-needed chance to catch our breath and learn more about David’s backstory, so we can prepare for the wonders that lie ahead.

Comic-book fans might be eager for Legion to hurry up and get to “the good stuff,” connecting David to the X-Men universe they know and love. But I’m not in any hurry. Speaking as someone with next-to-zero knowledge of comic books, this is the first superhero show I’ll be adding to my DVR’s season-pass list. Legion has created a compelling world that firmly stands on its own… and I look forward to Hawley and the cast dazzling me even more in the weeks to come.

["Cane Dewey" Johnson]

www.forbes.com/sites/merrillbarr/2017/01/18/legion-review-x-men-fx/#5d6ad9994ec5

'Legion' Review: A Trippy New X-Men Series That Couldn't Care Less About Being Tied To The X-Men

Ratings:

FX is not a network with great success when it comes to comic book fair. It tried many times over to get an adaptation of Powers off the ground (the series eventually landed at the Playstation Network before being cancelled after two seasons). It’s also not very well known for adaptations. FX is one of the last bastions for original content on the small screen. That said, thanks to Fargo, that tune may be changing… but in a real FX kind of way.

Adapting Legion, a comic almost no one knows of, is a big step. It will allow the show to grow without too many eyeballs screaming, “Look! Look! An X-Men TV show!” This lack of massive comic book fan anticipation means the show can grow at its own pace, which has always been the network’s style. If Legion takes off, it won’t be right out of the gate. It will be a grower. It’s what we’ve come to expect from the former home of Sons of Anarchy.

Review:

With superheroes being the mainstay they are on the small screen between ABC, Marvel and Netflix, it was only a matter of time before Marvel’s famed X-Men franchise was brought to the medium. However, instead of going with a well known or even semi-well known character from comics lore, FX and Marvel Television opted to go in a different direction entirely. That direction is what leads us to Legion.

The trippy new series created by Fargo’s Noah Hawley follows the journey of David Haller, a mentally ill young man diagnosed with schizophrenia that may not actually be sick after all. As it turns out, David is a mutant - one of many in a group of newly evolved humans. Unfortunately for David, and the rest of his kind, there are certain individuals that do not wish for him to be left alone in this world.

Like Jessica Jones, Daredevil and every other adult-themed Marvel series, Legion is a very not safe for work comic book series. Who it’s meant for is anyone that’s a fan of the Legion line, or just some good-old psychological thriller adventure. The show is far removed from the tone of Fargo as well. If Hawley has a style, he has yet to make it apparent between his two television series.

FX’s latest comes out of the gate swinging. It’s fully formed and fully confident. The pilot may be a bit overlong, but it pays off with one truly fantastic sequence that will hook anyone into the show for at least one extra episode. It also has the added benefit of not being loosely (if at all) tied to the currently running film franchise produced by 20th Century Fox. Legion is not the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. of the X-Men live-action universe. It’s its own thing.

All that said, the stand-out of Legion is its jittery antagonist played by Dowton Abbey’s Dan Stevens. If Heath Ledger’s Joker was a good guy, he’d probably get a long with Stevens’ Haller. Hell, he’d probably get a long with him regardless. The actor is completely “going for it” with his performance. Would it be enough to land some awards recognition a few months from now? Maybe. But, it will be one of the performances that, if left off the list, will have everyone saying, “you forgot one!”

Many things can be enjoyed about Legion. It’s a fascinating character experiment with a comic book line very few have any awareness of. How true the show will stick to the origins of the character is unknown. A quick Wikipedia scan will reveal one major character trait that, if done in this show, will change the perspective of many things. However, even if the series never goes there, there’s reason to be hopeful of what’s the come based on the first three episodes.

Legion premiers Wednesday, February 8th at 10/9c on FX.

[Malibu Albino]

I'm looking forward to this, the Fargo show was amazing and I have the utmost faith in Noah Hawley's ability to mine gold from the X-Men movieverse.

[Perd]

I'll definitely check this out. If what Noah Hawley's done with Fargo is any indication, we could be in for some fantastic TV.

[Juice]

First Fox owned Xmen project I have been excited for an probably 15 years.

["Cane Dewey" Johnson]

www.comicbookmovie.com/tv/dc/the_flash/psychedelic-new-cast-portraits-series-premiere-promotional-stills-a148466

[Legion]

Looks like it'll be great, but I always hate when it tells me someone has used the comic as a 'jumping off point' and then creates something so far from the actual comic they may as well have just made their own show.

Just make your own show if you aren't planning to stick closer to the source material. Why irritate a small but incredibly vocal fan base when you could give them something they would otherwise love by saying 'it is like' rather than 'it has the name, and that's it'

[wakko]

Looks good, but not sure exactly what it is about besides mutants. Will check it out even with my lack of knowledge on the subject.

[Deleted]

I'm going to check out the first episode but I'm not super excited for it or anything.

["Cane Dewey" Johnson]

["Cane Dewey" Johnson]

uproxx.com/sepinwall/legion-fx-x-men-review-fargo-noah-hawley/

Is FX’s ‘X-Men’ Spin-Off ‘Legion’ The First Truly Great Comic Book TV Series?

“I have to know. Is this… is this real?”

So wonders David Haller, the hero of Legion, FX’s new X-Men spin-off series, and it’s a question he asks, or is asked, over and over throughout the show’s pilot episode, which debuts next Wednesday night at 10pm ET.

David, you see, has spent most of his life being told that he’s mentally ill, and has been medicated accordingly. But as the series begins, he starts encountering mysterious people who suggest he’s perfectly healthy, and that what psychiatrists mistook for a disorder was actually the manifestation of David’s vast mutant psychic powers. So as David (Dan Stevens) toggles back and forth between the two explanations for the voices in his head, he understandably keeps wondering if any of this — his powers, his would-be girlfriend Syd (Rachel Keller), best friend Lenny (Aubrey Plaza), and the various alleged forces of light and dark — actually exists.

David’s question is also one I found myself asking often as I raced through the stunning debut episode and the two wonderful hours of TV that follow it. Legion is so strange, so idiosyncratic, so outside the norms of anything we’ve come to expect from modern comic book adaptations, on the big screen or small, that it was hard not to wonder if I was just imagining the whole thing, or if it was an elaborate, expensive prank perpetrated by FX and Fargo creator Noah Hawley, here adapting a relatively obscure X-character introduced in the ’80s by Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz.

The Marvel films and movies — both the ones produced directly by Marvel and the ones that come from outside studios that hold rights to certain characters (like Fox with the X-Men, though Fox brought Marvel in to help make Legion) — are such factory-designed products that even the best ones only deviate slightly from one another to reveal the personalities of the people who made them. You might note a particularly Joss Whedon-y bit of banter in Avengers, or recognize a Community alum in one of the Russo brothers’ Captain America movies, but these projects are designed to prioritize the brand over the individual, and to make each franchise hospitable to visitors from all the other ones, so that it won’t feel weird if Falcon has a cameo in Ant-Man’s film, or if Spider-Man swings into the middle of a civil war among Avengers.

In the comics, David is related to a significant X-Men member. These early Legion episodes offer no clues as to whether the TV version has similar family ties, but the show is so tonally unlike any of the films that it’s hard to imagine Hugh Jackman or Michael Fassbender wandering in to give David a hug. This isn’t X-Men being done for TV, the way Agents of SHIELD is so often presented as the budget Avengers, but more like what would happen if some exasperated executive went to see Wes Anderson, or a French New Wave director — or, for that matter, the man who somehow turned the Coen brothers’ seemingly singular Fargo into the inspiration for one of TV’s greatest current series — threw a typically bizarre Sienkiewicz page from New Mutants on their desk, and left in an exasperated huff, muttering, “We don’t know what the hell this is or what to do with it. Have fun.”

Hawley, whose only previous professional directing credit was a season 2 Fargo episode, is behind the camera for the super-sized Legion pilot (without commercials, it’s 68 minutes; FX will air it in a 90-minute timeslot), and it’s a stylistic tour de force, telekinetically throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the screen to convey the way that David experiences the world.

We open with a series of beautiful tableau images of David as he grows from peaceful newborn to troubled young man, scored to The Who’s “Happy Jack” — one of several British Invasion tunes, fitting for a show whose visual aesthetic seems to be “What might a Londoner from the 1960s imagine the future would look like?” From there, we’re bouncing back and forth through David’s good times and bad, including a lengthy stint in a mental hospital where he meets Syd — with whom he has a sweet but chaste romance because she can’t abide being touched — and an interrogation by a mysterious government agent who knows much more about David than he lets on. The cutting between past and present — or between fantasy and reality — is lightning quick and intentionally disorienting, and every time Hawley allows you to briefly feel like you’re on solid footing, he literally turns the camera upside down, or stages a musical number to Serge Gainsbourg’s “Pauvre Lola,” or switches up the aspect ratio from scene to scene (like occasional glimpses of David’s worried sister Amy, played by Katie Aselton, as if through a viewfinder).

This all threatens to come off as wildly over-directed and self-induglent, yet Hawley’s choices as writer and director instead thrillingly feel all of a piece, and the best way he could capture David’s confusion and potentially fragile sanity. The next two episodes, directed by Fargo and Mad Men veteran Michael Uppendahl, are a bit more reserved — and, as a result, a bit less electrifying — but even they manage their own impressive flourishes, like a device where David gets to revisit his own memories, only to discover that his mind is reluctant to share all the details.

A lot of what makes Legion work is the same playfulness that Hawley brought to Fargo. There are big questions here about mental health, eugenics, the fate of humanity, blah blah blah, but moment to moment, scene to scene, there is a spring in the step of the show and its characters. It’s the kind of series where the imposing Melanie Bird (Jean Smart) — the closest thing Legion has to a Professor X type — uses a coffee machine that offers parables (in the voice of Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords) while it’s brewing up her morning espresso, and where super powers are often revealed in a casual fashion that ‘s far more unsettling and impressive than if they were presented with the usual fanfare. Even when the show brushes up against tradition — a massive escape scene done as a minute-plus single take, with powers being hurled around indiscriminately — it does it in a way that looks like nothing else from the superhero genre, and that leaves ambiguity about exactly what’s happening, and why.

Stevens, all but unrecognizable from his days as dashing Matthew Crawley on Downton Abbey, makes an instantly sympathetic and compelling hero, equal parts confused straight man and unwitting bringer of chaos. The great Keller (like Smart, an import from Fargo season 2, where she played Jeffrey Donovan’s rebellious daughter) offers a similarly complicated blend: Syd is a woman who wants to see the world through happy and innocent eyes (when we first meet her in the mental hospital, she’s wearing her hair in pigtails), but there’s a dark past underneath that she reveals in careful, controlled trickles that bring non-powered complications to the love story at the heart of Legion. Plaza plays Lenny with the kind of leering glee that suggests she gets to watch this show along with us whenever she’s not on camera, and the show shares Fargo‘s gift for endearingly weird and expository character names, whether a villain with a creepy eye known only as The Eye (Mackenzie Gray), an ally of Melanie’s called Ptonomy Wallace (Jeremie Harris), and a pair of seemingly unrelated good guys (played by Bill Irwin, at his most mellifluous, and Amber Midthunder) with the identical-sounding names of Cary and Kerry Loudermilk.

The first episode is such a mind trip that later chapters risk seeming tame and conventional, but Legion continues to have many tricks up its bespoke sleeves. The either/or question about who and what David is proves more complicated than both sides expect, and if anything, the later episodes (the third in particular) are even more disturbing as Melanie and friends dig deep into exactly what makes him tick, and how dangerous that might be to all of them.

It’s a delight, existing so far outside the mold of recent superhero adaptations in the 2010s that it couldn’t see the mold even with telescopic vision. It’s a comic book show likely to be as appealing to people who have no interest in comic books as to those who can name David’s famous relative without Googling, if not more, and it’s easily the most exciting new series this young year in TV has offered so far.

Is this real? God, I hope so.

["Cane Dewey" Johnson]

All of the superhero shows should take note: up your cinematography because holy shit does Legion have visual style to spare. It even makes a lot of the recent comic book movies look pedestrian in comparison.

And there might even be another character from the X-books besides Legion himself.

SPOILER: Click to show

{Spoiler}The Devil with the Yellow Eyes that we see throughout the pilot could be one of David's personalities, but I'm thinking that maybe he's Shadow King?

["Cane Dewey" Johnson]

I don't need the show to connect to the X-Men movies, but I'd be open to a Patrick Stewart Professor X spot on the show regardless.

[Mackenzie Gorn]

Feb 8, 2017 23:38:51 GMT -5 "Cane Dewey" Johnson said:

All of the superhero shows should take note: up your cinematography because holy shit does Legion have visual style to spare. It even makes a lot of the recent comic book movies look pedestrian in comparison.

And there might even be another character from the X-books besides Legion himself.

SPOILER: Click to show

{Spoiler}The Devil with the Yellow Eyes that we see throughout the pilot could be one of David's personalities, but I'm thinking that maybe he's Shadow King?

SPOILER: Click to show

{Spoiler}{Spoiler}
Best idea I've seen is that he's Mojo.

[Brood Lone Wolf Funker]

After that last episode they basically confirmed two things

SPOILER: Click to show

{Spoiler}The Yellow Eyes demon is Shadow King and secondly that Xavier is David's father

[BlackoutCreature]

Shadow King needs to stop being so sexy. It makes me feel weird.

["Cane Dewey" Johnson]

There's a great joke in tonight's episode that makes me want Patrick Stewart on this show in a big, bad way.

[revolver86]

Finally binged this today. Holy hell is this show all sorts of awesome. It also reinforces my love for Audrey Plaza.

[Rave]

Mar 19, 2017 9:45:22 GMT -5 BlackoutCreature said:

Shadow King needs to stop being so sexy. It makes me feel weird.

I'm finally getting around to watching last week's episode and I'd like to second this. That extended dance break, while knowing that that's not always what it looks like... It's a beyond squirmy feeling.