Invincible: A Lesson in Aimless Pacing and Realism

So, I didn’t really love Invincible.

The idea behind the cut-to-titles gag every episode is funny in concept, but never really works in execution? It feels like the sort of thing that was probably a lot better in the comic, which kind of sums up this show. There you go, now you don't need to read the article!

For any variety of reasons, I originally wasn’t planning to write this one. When I’ve written previously on movies or shows that I “didn’t like,” there was usually some broader problem at stake. Invincible isn’t like that – it’s not glaringly insulting like Joker was, or horrendous to its characters like Rise of Skywalker was. I can see, on an abstract level, why someone might have liked this show. But I just don’t get the sheer love for it I’ve seen on social media. I recognize that there’s a sizable chunk of this that is kind of just personal preference, but for whatever reason, I’ve got to get this off my chest, and I’ve been at a loss for relevant things to talk about here anyways. All that said… yeah, I didn’t really love Invincible.

Two notes: first, I generally try to keep reviews spoiler-free but that’s kind of impossible for this show, given the concluding events of the first episode drive the entire story (or, at least they should). So, I’ll give a brief overview of my main problems before diving into the way the actual telling of the story kind of falls apart. Second, I’m specifically looking at the Amazon adaption of Invincible – from what I understand the original comic book is different in ways that are important. I believe that the show is more or less a very loose adaption of the comic, kind of rearranging set pieces and events (and even shifting tone) and so I think a lot of my judgements are show-specific.

I kept expecting Mark's training to become relevant kind of like the "icing problem" in Iron Man, but I don't think that ever happened? But I'm also forgetful.

After all, Invincible as a show is entering into a specific cultural moment. Zack Snyder’s Justice League has apparently taken the world by storm, bolstering heroes who are “realistic” and “grounded,” shown mostly through their cynicism and violence. Snyder’s extended cut notably puts focus on the idea of a Superman who could fall into darkness. The Boys focuses even more on “realistic” critiques of superheroes. While I haven’t watched The Boys, from what I understand it manages a fairly measured criticism of what superheroes would look like in the modern light, while actually toning down on some of the more offensive elements. A central figure in The Boys is a fascist, self-centered Superman figure. And apparently an Injustice animated movie has just been greenlit, which also depicts Superman off-the-reigns. The thing is, I’m just not really interested in that kind of story?

I feel like Watchmen kind of broke everyone’s brains. Either the original story of Snyder’s film retelling. Alan Moore’s story changed a lot of the way comics were viewed, it brought familiar archetypes into the world of international politics and Cold War terror. More than that, it strove to ask what kind of person would become a superhero – Moore’s answer largely consisted of social outcasts. These were people who were relentlessly uncool; everyday people with fairly everyday struggles, but with an obsessive need to be more. Snyder didn’t seem particularly pleased with that answer, in his 2009 adaption, superheroes are extremely cool. They’re edgy and sexy and violent, spraying blood everywhere. It might surprise some to learn that the Watchmen comic is relatively bloodless. In fact, the amount of violence and blood is toned down throughout the comic so that the gruesome climax has as much impact as it does. Because of how restrained the comic had been, the brutality at the end is shocking, and it means something. While Moore’s Watchmen isn’t sexless, it’s not sexualized – again, the goal is to depict relatively normal people. Snyder’s Watchmen features characters clad in leather and spandex, making love to the music of Leonard Cohen (which maybe isn’t that sexy in execution, but I digress). It’s often said that Snyder tried to recreate Moore’s comic panel-for-panel, and while he often succeeds visually, he just as often misses the heartbeat that runs under that imagery. Watchmen is stripped of its themes and rendered to pure visual sensation, so naturally, things have to look gorier and sexier. To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with either of those things, but it gets exhausting when there’s no substance behind any of it. More and more, it feels like ‘dark’ or ‘realistic’ comic book stories are following in that lane as if more blood makes a story more interesting. It doesn’t. If the goal is to tell comic book stories for adults, then simply dumping more gore on the characters is a pretty shallow way to do so.

You're telling me that Omni-Man looked like J.K. Simmons even in the comics? Has he just always been J.K. Simmons?

Invincible as a show feels the culmination of this sort of thinking. I really like the first few episodes of it! It initially appears as if it's going to balance a fine line between coming-of-age story, and grimy critique of supermensch ideology. The first few episodes are fairly strong, and it seems like it’s saying something with its gore. Really, that’s all I want – if you’re going to double down on violence, that violence should have some semblance of a purpose. It should inform the world; it should affect the characters. If nothing else, it should at least be entertaining. The John Wick movies are hardly clean, but they’re cool, and incredibly well put together. The violence in John Wick also draws attention to how vulnerable Wick could be, but Mark Grayson in Invincible is… well, invincible. The blood, then, isn’t to be cool, it’s to be horrific and to show how fragile a human could be in this world. Ostensibly, you’re not really supposed to enjoy it. But as Invincible goes on, it feels like it forgets its own purpose. By the end, it feels like the show is downright relishing in the brutal murder of innocent civilians, and any sort of theme it intends to convey gets lost in all the guts strewn across the screen. The climax is a solid half-hour of the villain indiscriminately killing people while saying “look at how pointless human life is! They deserve this!” What’s worse, is Mark Grayson can’t even really summon up a refutation. It’s all depressingly nihilistic. It just doesn’t do it for me.

Honestly, the speed at which this show makes the Guardians an endearing group of characters is impressive.

But all that aside, I think it could work. I really think the story is salvageable, guts and all – where Invincible truly falls apart at the seams is in its pacing. Invincible is driven by a central mystery that the show itself doesn’t care about. For this, I will have to get into spoilers. If you really want to go into this show free of spoilers, go ahead and watch the first episode or so. That will give you the gist, at the very least.

The first episode introduces us to our main players – Mark (voiced by Steven Yeung) is an eager son of the most powerful superhero out there, desperate to develop his powers and help save the world. His father, Nolan, aka Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons), is a clear Superman pastiche. He’s broad, heroic, and more powerful than anyone else on the scene. In fact, Invincible generally takes after the school of Watchmen, building new characters out of clear allusions to the sort of superheroes we’re familiar with. Our central superhero team, the Guardians of the Globe, features clear parallels to Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Martian Manhunter, the Flash, Batman, and their own sort of Superman or Captain America-meets-Wolverine. It’s a pleasantly effective gimmick, the team members are all fun in their own right, and having such clear parallels means the audience will pretty quickly invest in these new Guardians. Through our first episode, we see how Mark and the rest of the world looks up to the Guardians, but even more, how much he looks up to his father. For the most part, the initial episode is a slice-of-life coming-of-age story as Mark struggles both with school and with his responsibilities at home. However, as Mark finally grows into his powers, the audience watches as Omni-Man seems to grow distant. Something is up with him, and he doesn’t seem happy that his son is finally developing abilities. Then, at the episode's end, Omni-Man lures all of the Guardians to a central location, where he brutally murders them, one by one. The Guardians of the Globe are dead, at the hands of Mark’s father. The episode ends as we ask a single question – why?

What is motivating Omni-Man? What brings him to do what he did? Why is it that his actions seem to be triggered by Mark’s new powers? And why exactly is Nolan so upset that his son has powers anyways? These are great leading questions, but the show seems entirely uninterested in answering them.

The Teen Team is around just enough to feel like they should be important, but not enough to actually contribute to the story in any tangible way.

Invincible runs for eight episodes, but for the majority of the show, the only people investigating the Guardians’ murders are minor characters. While Mark runs around learning to be a hero, people deep on the sidelines poke around trying to figure out who could have killed the Guardians. It isn’t until about halfway through that those characters even learn that Nolan is responsible. It’s not until the season is about to end that the show even approaches the questions it asked in its first episode. In all this time, Mark, our protagonist, is not even involved in the investigation. In fact, he doesn’t get in on the revelation until the last scene of the penultimate episode. And what is Mark up to in all this time?

Honestly, not very much.

I enjoy how this show came out at the same time as Falcon & the Winter Soldier; 2021 truly is the year of neck sock.

The most shocking part of Invincible is how episodic it is. Every episode consists of a new outside threat for Mark, and him learning to overcome that threat. Many of these threats don’t even really challenge his character or force him to grow. In episode 4, he belligerently protects a rocket on its way to Mars, only to immediately grow bored of his job and slack off while the crewmembers get kidnapped. His reckless retrieval of the crew directly leads to a potential world-ending situation on Mars and the secret replacement of one of the crewmembers with a Martian. None of these plot points come back in the show proper, and none of them force Mark to really introspect and deal with his flappable nature. Every episode is kind of like this. Episode 5 almost feels like it's going somewhere, as Titan (voiced by Mahershala Ali!) encourages Mark to come down from his heights and into the streets to see how the world is really run. Titan is a lower-tier criminal, caught in crime because he depends on the income from higher criminals to feed his family, but offers Mark the chance to fight his boss and take out a major crime lord. Nolan tells Mark that Titan is still a criminal, and not to be trusted. Given what we know about Mark’s father, this sounds like a great time to challenge Mark’s conception of the world and to see things more in greys than in blacks and whites. But at the episode’s end, Titan simply takes the place of his old boss. Crime continues, and Mark seems to learn nothing. Titan’s new empire is, like the Martians, irrelevant to the rest of the show, and gets unceremoniously dropped.

I think this still could genuinely be from any episode of this show. Mark gets beaten up so often it kind of starts to become funny.

As I’m editing this, I’m realizing this is a lot like my critique of The Mandalorian. That show is similarly episodic, but it at least has the backing of the Western formula behind it. Both Invincible and The Mandalorian are 8-episode mini-series, and at least the first seasons of both shows are mostly filler outside of the first and last couple of episodes. I’d argue that The Mandalorian doesn’t really work, but at least it’s supported by the dynamic between Mando and the Child. Invincible doesn’t even have that; there’s a central romance arc that is okay and then drastically falls apart towards the end. The leading mystery ought to hold up the show, but again, Mark is about as far removed from that mystery as could be. Mostly, it seems to me that high-budget mini-series like these aren’t really well-structured for such an episodic format. The assumption is that we’re going to get some sort of story, and then we don’t.

I couldn't think of a clever caption for this one, but I liked discount Coulson! He was neat.

So much of it just feels like it's floundering, and I don’t get all the love. I do think there’s a really strong 2-hour movie here, but stretched out to an 8-hour series, it loses any sense of cohesion. Without any development on the central question, or really any development whatsoever as to Nolan’s motivations, and very little development in Mark’s character, it becomes harder and harder to justify the show’s length. What’s more, the amount of gore, which becomes exhausting after eight episodes of monotonous blood, would be much more effective in a briefer time frame. The final episode has Omni-Man parading Mark around the earth, beating him into submission by callously killing innocents; but by this point, this is nothing the audience hasn’t already seen. When you’ve already filled the show with beheadings, simply adding more doesn’t actually impact anyone. As I said before, Nolan’s ‘point’ in all this is to show how fragile humanity is. Nolan and Mark are both Viltrumites, aliens with lengthy life-spans, and so the life of a human is but a speck in Nolan’s imagination. In their clash, Nolan hopes to show Mark how futile living for humans will be, and how he should abandon Earth for Viltrum. Mark’s beaten response is that even when everyone on Earth dies out, he’ll still have his dad… which would be a stirring rebuttal if his dad were less of a tyrannically abusive father. It also insufficiently combats the central idea of Nolan’s argument, which is that people are worthless. Invincible ends on a note of ‘yeah, sure, humanity is completely worthless, but uh, I’ll protect them anyways!’ Maybe I missed something dramatic, but I’m just not seeing the thematic depth.

I've seen a lot of praise for this scene in particular, and how shocking it was - but by the time we got here, I feel like the point had been made. Killing a subway full of people didn't really add to it at all.

All that said, I’m just not sure who this show is for. It doesn’t seem to be saying anything unless the message genuinely is supposed to be how much superheroes and humans suck. The violence mostly seems to exist for cool violence, but if I’m being honest, the animation isn’t much to look at anyways. The ‘cool’ factor isn’t there most of the time. Very few of the fights feel fun or innovative, and I can’t really see myself returning to any of them. The only real draw to this show seems to be the cast – and believe me, it is a very good cast. I’ve mentioned Yeung and Simmons, who are both exceptional in their roles, but the show is dripping with surprisingly fun casting decisions everywhere you look. Atom Eve is brought to life by Gillian Jacobs (oh, Britta is in this?) who surprisingly has the most fleshed-out subplot in the show. Zachary Quinto does the same Zachary Quinto thing he’s been doing since Heroes (actually, Quinto’s character here has a surprising number of similarities to Sylar). Sandra Oh holds together what little emotive core this show has. The casting is legitimately impressive but often feels like it’s covering up for weak writing. I’m also generally suspicious of the growing trend in animation to cast big-name actors instead of professional voice actors, but that’s neither here nor there. Grey Griffon shows up to voice a character or two, so it’s not like the typical cadre of voice actors is fully absent. Besides the voice cast, the show is also filled with needle drops, including two-to-three high-energy songs per episode. A lot of them are decent tracks, but again, don’t seem to serve any real purpose. Every choice in Invincible feels like a hollow attempt to maintain the viewer’s attention.

At some point we need to have a discussion about how meme culture is kind of ruining the longevity of stories.

Again, I feel like I missed something major in this show. It barely cares about its own story, its well-acted characters have little actually going for them, and there seems to be very little thematic cohesion holding all the disparate stories together. It’s all spectacle, but the lackluster animation means it’s not even particularly pretty spectacle. IGN has an interesting article comparing the show to the original comic, and it certainly seems like something was missed in translation.[1] If the article is in any way accurate, it seems as though Invincible’s comic book run achieved something closer to the balance I was hoping for. Robert Kirkman’s original story was much more tongue-in-cheek, managing to toe the line between irrelevant superhero pastiche and serious, grounded drama. The realistic brutality was an occasional shock to the senses, not an ever-present numbing sensation. Instead of properly satirizing the genre, the Invincible show just feels like a self-serious judgement of it. Much like in Snyder’s attempts towards ‘serious’ superhero stories, humans suck and superheroes are even worse. It’s all cynical deconstruction, with no reconstruction in sight. It’s just exhausting.

I’ve come down pretty hard on this show. In truth, I thought it was okay. Like I said earlier, I enjoy a lot of the ideas in it. I think Mark and Nolan’s conflict has the potential to be really, really cool and interesting. You could probably preserve their fight as-is if you made alterations to the rest of the show. There’s just so much filler that needs to be cut. We don’t need Zachary Quinto’s plotline. We don’t need the Hellboy/Rorschach mash-up, as fun as he is. Just tie Mark directly to the investigation. Have the brutality actually mean something rather than just be for fluff. I can only watch people be bisected on-screen so many times before it gets boring. And let your haphazard narrative be about something.

I feel you, Mark.

Anyways, now that I have more time, I’m hopefully going to be writing a decent bit more. And theatres should open up soon, too! With a little bit of luck, I’ll be able to be more active here, so if you have any movies or shows you’ve wanted a discussion on in the meantime, feel free to shoot them by me and I’ll see if I have any ideas.

[1] https://www.ign.com/articles/invincible-how-the-show-fails-the-comic-amazon