- Network: Netflix
- Series Premiere Date: May 7, 2021
Critic Reviews
- Critic score
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More straightforward than The Umbrella Academy but lacking the playfulness or bite of The Boys, this is a decent enough stab at superhero deconstruction, if one that takes itself far too seriously.
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It’s all engaging enough, but a certain airlessness constrains the entertainment value. ... The problem is that it comes perilously close to taking itself too seriously. Any opportunity for fun is shut down by perpetually morose teens, action set-pieces we have seen many times before and clunky speeches about the state of the world.
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There are plenty of problems with America, and with the superhero genre’s relationship with violence and politics, but Jupiter’s Legacy doesn’t really address any of them. Like The Utopian himself, the show’s creators are stuck looking back at an imagined Golden Age, with no way to move forward and build something better.
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For a series about superheroes, Jupiter's Legacy moves in what feels like slow motion. The result is a Netflix drama that's impressive in its scope -- adding to the growing roster of dark comic-book tales -- but frustrating in its sluggish pacing, oscillating between twin timelines over the course of its eight initial episodes.
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There are interesting sparks of narrative interest here, but they are all but snuffed out over and over again by the flat, shallow scripts and the way the show’s women and minority characters are handled about as well as they would have been in the actual 1930s.
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The story is ultra-convoluted and has what feels like an ever-expanding cast.
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This series might have felt revolutionary nearly a decade ago (when the comic series was originally published), but today it just treads on tired and well-worn territory.
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A slack, derivative story with flat visuals and action. It’s a show so utterly disinterested in its present that it wallows in the past for lengthy stretches of each of its eight episodes, and then bets everything on the final moments of its season finale.
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The source material is perfectly sound, but this adaptation doesn’t do it a shred of justice. The fleeting moments that work are far outweighed by an uneven cast, lame script and agonising pace, the latter of which is fast becoming a systemic problem suffered by most Netflix original series.
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Ultimately, it's not much of anything beyond a slowly unreeling plot played out by thinly realized characters sometimes accompanied by some decently realized special effects.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 41 out of 74
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Mixed: 15 out of 74
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Negative: 18 out of 74
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May 8, 2021
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May 8, 2021
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May 8, 2021