By Jaden Bouck
Before I get in the arena with this show, I want to make something clear: the reviews I write are not opinion pieces. I don’t base my view of any form of media on some sort of objective enjoyment. However well a movie, for example, handles its story, characters, writing, etc. is what I base my rating on. So even though you may have really liked Loki, frankly: I don’t care. The only thing I care about is if it stands up to criticism, not whether some people find it enjoyable.
As I have mentioned before, fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are particularly unconcerned with the quality of the entries in that franchise. They just watch it and only like or dislike it based on events in the story, not any of the cinematic elements that determine whether the movie or tv show is well made. I have no problem with people enjoying movies without analyzing them; I’m actually quite fond of The Expendables series, even though it has abysmally bad writing. However, when a person claims a movie is objectively good, and will argue with someone in favor of that view just because they enjoyed that film, that’s when I get a little irritated.
Just like every other review I do, this will contain spoilers. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about all the places Loki went wrong.
Story: The hardest concept to establish a movie on is the concept of time. Very few filmakers can actually successfully portray anything like time travel and paradoxes without confusing the audience, or creating massive logic gaps. Unfortunately for Loki, it isn’t one of the successful ones.
How would anyone short of God have any idea what constitutes a “nexus event” and what doesn’t? You’d have to be omniscient. If even someone dropping a penny could cause a butterfly effect, how would one even know? I refuse to believe that Kang has intricate knowledge of all space and time, at least if Kevin Feige wants me to believe the Avengers have any chance of taking him down in future projects.
There’s no way only sentient beings can be “variants”, either. If the sun has a solar flare that causes a nexus event in some way, does the TVA have to prune the sun? How does Kang erase the memories of the variants? If Sylvie is a variant because she isn’t the same gender as the one in the chosen timeline or whatever, why was she allowed to grow up some instead of getting pruned at birth? Who knows.
So obviously, the time elements of the story in Loki don’t hold together very well. Loki’s character journey wasn’t very compelling either, especially for anyone who doesn’t want Marvel characters being treated like food that gets taken out of the trash to be eaten again. He already had a meaningful character arc, one that wrapped itself up nicely; he did not need to be brought back to life. A finished, multi-film character arc means he isn’t interesting enough to have his own tv show. “Does this story didn’t need to be told?” is the first question any director should be asking when starting a new project, but that doesn’t usually happen when the prospect of lots of money is involved. Any other project could have been written to introduce the multiverse and Kang, and outside of that, Loki literally has no point and does not affect anything.
Acting: Once again, the acting is one of the only saving graces of an MCU project. Obviously, when you have to pay an actor millions to sign on to your film, they’re talented enough to deserve the money. Hiddleston and Wilson give the best performances, with Di Martino close behind.
Writing: I almost decided to title this review “Woki: Another Marvel Disasterpiece” instead because of how overtly political they made this movie, but I thought it might not be so obvious what I was reviewing to some people. Boy, where do I even begin?
We can start with the forced diversity, I guess. We can add Ravonna Renslayer to the surprisingly large list of comics redheads that got race swapped. Hunter B-15 was written to be a man before a more diverse candidate auditioned. Sylvie almost exclusively takes on male opponents, and dispatches them with ease, while Loki has a hard time fighting his female opponents, and usually gets beaten by them. I don’t care who plays Kang as long as they get their skin painted blue to be comics accurate, and as long as they don’t keep Kang black in future movies, I don’t much care about that particular change. Marvel movies do their absolute best to avoid any comics accurate elements in their films, but Loki being bisexual gets to make the cut.
That whole third episode was trash. I understood already there was an underlying message about class divides that was being thrown in for no reason, but I found it especially obnoxious when they genuinly have a person in the background of the scene yell: (I’m paraphrasing here) “They’re only letting the wealthy have tickets!”. I got that by the fact I have eyes, and can see the plainly dressed people standing in a long line while the ornamentally dressed got to get on the train. It’s worth asking: don’t the writers of these shows get paid far more than the average American?
Later that episode, when the buildings are all crashing around, Loki and Sylvie are running in erratic circles and going in and of buildings where the entrances are connected and are only a few feet apart. To top it off, they randomly start fighting the police on that planet. Why would anyone be trying to arrest people without a real cause while they are about to get crushed by buildings?
And to finish out this section, it destroyed my immersion when Mobius started talking about jet skis when he was about to die. How am I supposed to take someone’s death seriously when the writers start trying to make another quirky marvel moment out of the scene?
Characters: The writers could not decide which Loki they wanted to use: deceitful Loki from Avengers, or genuine and caring Loki from Infinity War. They just make him whichever one they need for each scene, which makes the average viewer who treats movies as more than something to turn off your brain for, lose interest in Loki’s character. Sylvie refuses to change herself, unlike every other character in this show, which makes her unlikable.
Mobius has a pretty good arc, finding out what the TVA really is and all, but that doesn’t mean anything now that his memory has seemingly been erased. Ravonna’s motives and morals cannot be placed at all, so she isn’t a well designed character.
Cinematography: On par with the MCU for the most part, but the cgi in the third episode was reminiscent of an episode of Doctor Who. Doctor Who, I should add, has 25th the budget of Loki. The fight scene in “Lamentis” was terribly choreographed.
Accuracy: Yeah, it was nice having all those references in the fifth episode, but they were just references relegated to one episode. And as usual, the MCU can’t go all the way with the references. Classic Loki gets to be a character, but he’s only an older version of the character we already know, not one with a vastly different history, which would have been what truly made him Classic Loki.
Marvel did with Sylvie what they did with Bucky: instead of using two different characters like White Wolf and Winter Soldier, they combine them for a “reference”. Thing is though, they aren’t the same character, and anyone who wants to see, for example, White Wolf, in the MCU gets screwed over. The same thing happened with Sylvie. They combine female Loki (Sylvie) and a character called Enchantress. That’s incredibly frustrating, because Enchantress is a unique character with unique abilities and stories. Also, it’s very concerning, because Enchantress is madly in love with Thor in the comics. Think about that for a second…
Overall, this show wasn’t the worst, but it wasn’t really good. The story was pretty cohesive, and the stakes of Loki not being “pruned” were engaging at times. It may surprise you that I rate Loki 5/10, considering I titled it a “disasterpiece”, but when a show or movie is part of a franchise, you have to compare it to the other entries in that same franchise. It isn’t nearly as good as the rest, so on its own Loki gets a 5/10, but among its MCU siblings it ranks closer to a 2/10. (I probably should have remembered to do that in my Black Widow review…) That’s all for now folks, see you in the next review. Let’s hope the next thing inspires a positive review.
Macro Media Productions 