Marvel and DC have been the most popular costumed heroes on TV and in the movies for decades, and in pop culture for about sixty years before that. However, the streaming age has been a big break for other costumed heroes aimed at adults.
Whether it’s Netflix’s “The Umbrella Academy,” HBO’s “Watchmen,” or Amazon Prime’s “The Boys” and “Invincible,” all of these shows have been well received by critics and viewers and are among the most popular on their respective services.
That sets a high standard for the Netflix series Jupiter’s Legacy, which is based on Mark Millar’s comic books. Even though some parts of it work, it just doesn’t live up to the others.
Jupiter’s Legacy tells the story of Sheldon Sampson, the Utopian, his wife, and their two children. His son Brandon wants to be the next Utopian, which is basically the same thing as Superman, the most powerful hero on the planet. His daughter Chloe, on the other hand, has turned down the superhero life and is now a drug-addicted fashion model. There are a lot of other heroes, but none are as well-known or respected as the Sampsons.
Netflix Jupiter legacy:
The story takes place at two different times. This is the first and most obvious problem with the show. Almost half of the series is about Sheldon’s life during the Great Depression when he is played by a normal-looking Josh Duhamel. In the present day, he is played by Josh Duhamel with a wig, fake beard, and old-person makeup, just like Ben Daniels, Leslie Bibb, and Mike Wade.
It looks…crazy. I understand that the idea is for these heroes to age slowly over the course of 80 years, but in practice, it would have been much less jarring if they had simply cast old and young versions of these characters because the makeup and hair here are… not good and distracting every time they’re onscreen.I also don’t think Josh Duhamel is a good lead in this movie compared to others in the same genre, like Antony Starr’s Homelander or JK Simmons’ Omni-Man.
At least the utopian isn’t doing the same thing as these two “heroes.” He is not a secretly cruel superhero. Instead, he is trying to keep the last bit of order among heroes by sticking to a core code: no killing and no ruling. His son breaks the first rule, and Brainwave wants to break the second rule as he watches society fall apart.
Here is where some interesting questions are brought up. Few stories deal with the “hero” idea of never killing, even when supervillains keep getting out of jail and killing a lot of people before they are caught and sent back. Brandon kills a supervillain to save a dozen heroes, including himself and his family, from certain death, but his father gets angry with him for it. Brainwave can’t get over the fact that he didn’t do enough in wars like World War II and Vietnam. He tells his brother, “Stopping bank robbers won’t change the world.”
But these times of reflection don’t last long, and most of the show is boring and seems to go nowhere.
We spend way too much time on the past storyline, even though we all know where it’s going. Sheldon takes a group of people to a mysterious island, where they get superpowers. You might be interested in how that works, but spending half the show on that timeline is a bit much.
Brandon, who is a very important character in the source material, isn’t given enough time to develop in the present day, and heroes are introduced and killed off before you can even remember their names. In the present day, son-of-a-supervillain Hutch and his magic teleportation stick are my favorite characters,
but I didn’t connect with many others. Chloe is hard to feel sorry for because the show doesn’t really explain why she acts the way she does. All it says is that her father wasn’t around when she was growing up because he was too busy saving the world. Given how things end, this is likely to change in later seasons, but in this first season, she is mostly just a disaster.
I do think that Jupiter’s Legacy deals with important moral questions in a way that other superhero shows don’t. But what’s here isn’t very entertaining in the end because it’s written, edited, and cast in strange ways that don’t add up as a whole. I’ll definitely watch more “volumes” if they’re made, but this one isn’t as good as the source material should have been.
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