Legion

Legion jars the senses as a jagged-edged jigsaw puzzle that can’t easily be put together. But there’s no inclination to ever stop trying because the overall artistry is beautiful to behold and just won’t quit.

If Legion can maintain the balance of thriller-tautness and hallucinatory chaos that is done so well in the show’s opening hours, this will truly be a unique and superb superhero series.

The first three episodes of this X-Men-styled mutant melodrama are superb, and the pilot in particular is an all-timer, but the whole thing is so aesthetically fresh that I could see myself continuing to watch it even if it suddenly became dumb as hell, just to see what new storytelling trick showrunner Noah Hawley and his collaborators have up their puffy magicians’ sleeves.

Legion presents a superhero drama as psychic journey, distinguishing itself in an overcrowded genre by setting its most compelling drama in its protagonist’s mind. It’s no ordinary comic-book show: it’s a head trip, and it’s spectacular.

There is an abundance of quality in Legion at every level, making it a show you can’t stop watching and, oh yeah, the best show of the new year.

Patience and attention to detail are rewarded handsomely, however, as Legion serves up a an instantly compelling narrative laced with an intriguing sense of mystery and wonder. It makes for a riveting adventure packed with razor-sharp dialogue, clever visual touches, surrealistic flourishes and wonderfully winning performances.

The writer has taken key elements of his source material and applied them to a canvas of his own design. What’s here may feel familiar in singular moments, but it’s a breathtakingly original work when looked upon as a whole.

Legion is a dazzling and unusual show--full of extraordinary beings and events--but at its core are the same recognizable, human qualities that Hawley’s previously stretched to the limits.

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.

Legion plays a lot with themes of identity and memory and emotion, and if the key to visual storytelling is to show and not tell, well, Legion grasps onto that wholeheartedly. But above all, it’s a deeply considered portrait of mental illness.

Legion has created a compelling world that firmly stands on its own.

A rollicking psychedelic trip of a show that washes over you like a vat of Ken Kesey Kool Aid. Splashy, free-associative and generally as nuts as its schizophrenic characters, Legion is as delirious and dazzling as television gets.

An electroshock of striking originality, Legion seizes your imagination by blowing your mind and captures the high anxiety of reality-blur America. [Feb 3/10 2017, p.96]

The real beauty of Legion is its unpredictability and insistence on pushing back against the traditional hero narrative.

The ‘60s pop art-inspired style with which Hawley initially presents “Legion” speaks to an extraordinary level of creative intricacy and care in his storytelling. Aesthetically adventurous and candy-colored as the drama’s opening hours are, they’re also part of a compelling TV experiment.

Hawley's decision to disorient viewers by making David's unsettling and confusing mental landscape the visual launching point for this world is strategically smart--if challenging--and the skillful camera work has a panache that stamps the early episodes. Stylistically, there's nothing quite like Legion's smart take on mutant powers, which keeps the series more dramatic and less light or flippantly Marvel-esque.

Legion owes itself to the mind of its central character, David Haller. And to whom or what David owes his mind is the story that we’ll be returning to watch each and every week. The disorienting first sixty-plus minutes of Legion (airing February 8th) don’t answer much. What the chapter does introduce though is the bar-raising performance of Dan Stevens.

The dangerously entertaining Legion is a volatile mix of complete chaos and complete control.

If any show deserves your patience, it’s Legion. Rewards await.

Even if you barely understand a thing that’s going on (and be patient; chances are you will), Legion is a joy to watch, surreal and beautiful, with as many funny asides as frightening moments.

It is, to say the least, audacious. More importantly it’s interesting. It’s about the interior as much as the exterior. That’s weird. That’s good.

I’m not sure how long they can keep up that intensity. It can also feel messy at times, as if the genre jumping and confusing aesthetic aren’t quite as refined as they could be. However, these are both minor complaints for yet another major show from FX.

Three episodes in, it’s hard to say where the plot is going, other than down the rabbit hole of David’s worst thoughts. But Legion is a nightmare absorbing enough that you don’t feel the need to question the endgame.

It’s a strange, sometimes confusing and always visually arresting program.

I haven't a clue where the rest of the story is going, but I'm prepared to be surprised.

With all this world-building going on, Legion doesn't, at least in these early episodes, make the most of Hawley's talent for letting his characters express themselves in distinctive, individual voices. And the horror of David's situation hardly lends itself to Hawley's characteristic wit. But those are small problems, considering that Legion is a trippy explosion of creativity.

The challenge of Legion will be to make David’s quest for wholeness more than the sum of its flashy and often captivating parts. But the humane core of the drama offers a reason to hope for the best.

The series is visually arresting, with brightly colored clothes that seem to have come right out of closets from the 1970s. It adds to the series’ trippiness. Legion is not mainstream like Stevens’ “Downton Abbey,” most likely catering to sci fi and comic book fans instead.

A disorienting labyrinth of a show that's as seductive and visually arresting as it is frustrating.

The first three episodes are intriguing. Visually arresting. But if someone other than Hawley were running this show, I'd be a great deal more skeptical. As it is, I'm cautiously optimistic. With the emphasis on "cautiously."

For its own good, Legion needs to get out of its head.

Beautifully crafted, occasionally incoherent, often challenging and insistently demanding, but what’s not entirely clear in the early episodes is whether the payoff will be worth all the trouble.

It’s handsomely shot, and smartly acted, and ingeniously constructed enough to suggest there’s something mind-blowing lurking at its center. But as Hawley pushes from jazzed-up origin story to psychodrama, it starts to feel like a show with a Rubik’s cube where its heart should be.

At least initially, though, Legion is intriguing but well short of extraordinary.

As creator, writer and director, Hawley does everything he can to suppress the yawns that will surely come from the superhero-disinclined, setting the tone for a show that favors personality over powers, with dialogue that thankfully lacks the sonorous ballast of most superhero movies.

The show’s narrative trickery is a reflection of David’s fractured psyche. That can be more frustrating than illuminating, but the dazzling visual style makes the deliberately confusing narrative easier to embrace, and Stevens is fantastic as the conflicted but eager title character.

David, and the viewer, can't be so sure [the things you see are real], as every journey into his mind reveals a freaky maze of disturbing memory. Not an easy show to watch, Legion is even harder to shake. [30 Jan - 12 Feb 2017, p.19]

Legion is worth saving on your DVR but not, quite, worth taking the leap of investing real time. A show this ambitious shouldn't take the easy way out when it comes to building a character worthy of being called a "hero."