The Defenders

...and I don't get it.

Certainly not a big budget, heavy on the special effect blockbuster like the Avengers, but then again it wasn't supposed to be.

On the good side:

Excellent choreography of the fight scenes. Not quite up to the Daredevil series, but definitely well above average.

Cinematography and use of color well done.

Well acted by all 4 of the lead characters and excellent work by the supporting cast. Personally thought the actors had a decent chemistry.

Plot...not overly original but not bad.

Writing...again not overly original, but gives a workable vehicle for the actors.

The not so good:

CGI...not much here...the glowing fist doesn't see too impressive.

Directing and especially the pacing could have been better.

Overall:

I found this to be a highly watchable show, though well short of great. While I found Luke Cage and Iron Fist series heavily mired in mediocrity, this one holds its own in my opinion.

So you can google this, but in case you haven't here is what you should watch before seeing this, in the order I write them:

• Daredevil S1
• Jessica Jones S1
• Daredevil S2
• Luke Cage S1
• Iron Fist S1

If you watch those, you are fully informed about what is going on with every superhero and can fully enjoy the limited series as they call it that is Defenders. Now I have some issues with some character moments (Jessica Jones trying to convince us she doesn't care about other humans, when her first season was running on that premise, which made her look a bit weak to be honest, but more on that on her own show), but overall, this is just a lot of fun, with things happeninng that do have impact for the future. It is a bit of shame Netflix cancelled the shows, but it made it possible for me to finally say, hey let's binge those. Defenders may be stand alone and I would not have minded another reunion, but as it is, production values are high, effects are great and the fact it is only 8 episodes (the other shows ran for 13 episodes), makes it short and sweet and a lot of fun to watch. Especially with having some prior knowledge for the characters involved.

First of all, the cinematography is extremely bad. Throughout the season, it looks like there is zero effort to the make visual appealing, as if characters and camera are placed randomly, with no regard to the composition of a scene. Episode 8, the culmination of the whole show is terribly lit, oftentimes with just one or two lights THAT ARE VISIBLE ON SCREEN. As a result, the whole show looks lazy. It's hard to believe that Netflix was able to make Daredevil look simple yet elegant and screw up so badly for Defenders.

It doesn't help that the production value is extremely low. There is no attention to detail and sets are badly designed. Or is there any thought process in set designs at all. Jessica was googling on ADOBE FLASH. Simple but unforgivable mistakes like this really marks down the quality of the show. Interior design for major fight scenes are crude and uninteresting.

Camera work and editing looks interesting for episode 1. It's all downhill from there. There is way too much spinning around characters, and shooting at extremely low angles up at characters, making them look powerful. But the technique is cheesy af, extremely so when it's used a hundred times per episode.

Technically, Defenders doesn't have the most basic production quality. In terms of story telling, it's not the best either.

It's hard to imagine how an 8 episode show with 4 protagonists can possibly drag, but the writers managed to do so. There are too many standing-talking scenes that yield little progress or character development. Plot wise, it is simple, straight forward, and predictable.

What I loved about Daredevil and Jessica Jones is the depth of character. The scene in Daredevil where Matt holds a balloon alone in his empty apartment is one of my favorite scenes in TV. It effectively shows the loneliness and conflict Matt feels. Karen, Foggy, Trish, Jessica are developed to be extremely complicated persons in their own shows. But in Defenders, there are not one scene that has sufficient emotional depth. That's why the characters feel like shells of themselves. We see what they do and accept it because that's what they would do, as they continue to be what they were in their own shows. But within Defenders, they have no arc or innate incentive .

Defenders is disappointing and only a shadow of what Jessica Jones and Daredevil is. It has no depth and low production quality just makes it unwatchable at times. What a wasted opportunity!

I have obviously come late to this one-off Marvel series combining its four then-active solo heroes in one big arcing storyline. Moreover I haven't yet watched the Luke Cage or Iron Fist series so these characters, back stories and supporting characters weren't known to me apart from remembering Luke Cage as a brief boyfriend of Jessica Jones series 1. I have however watched all three series each of Daredevil and Jessica Jones and was attracted by this mega-crossover to see how these very individual characters could possibly be combined.

After watching all 8 episodes I'm bound to say it was all done well. My two pre-watched faves combined well, Matt Murdock's passion for his city of New York and ever-present humanity contrasted well with JJ's cynicism and selfishness. The Iron Fist character escaped me a little but I enjoyed getting better acquainted with Luke Cage after he left JJ series one early for his own show.

The story involving an unholy alliance between the five leaders of the worldwide crime syndicate The Hand, yes they are known as the fingers, to capture Iron Fist and use his power to access some kind of resurrection substance for their own nefarious ends was incidental, I found, to the interplay among the four reluctant heroes and by extension their group of friends and contacts. Sure there were a lot of reasonably entertaining ninja-style fight scenes, too many of them though enacted in the dark, but like any crossover, the fun for we comic-lovers is in seeing, for example, Cage and Iron Fist start to bond after initially knocking heads together, Jones pricking Murdock's "Protect my city" seriousness with acerbic one liners ("Love the ears!" she asides to Daredevil, the only one of them to go full super-hero and don a costume, "They're horns" he peevishly counters) plus it was just cool to see all their significant others hanging out too, as ever on the sidelines.

The big story, which principally revolved around a super-weapon known as The Black Sky, which turns out to be someone close to Matt, had enough twists and turns about it to keep me interested but it was incidental to just seeing the fab four gradually cohere into something capable of winning their fight to protect the Big Apple once again. Sigourney Weaver was the big surprise guest star as the head, or maybe that should be index-finger of The Hand and I also enjoyed seeing the return of the mystical Stick too.

Shorter than the usual 13-part series of the individual shows and noticeably less heavy on the psychology as the action-ante was exponentially increased, this for me was an enjoyable detour from the sometimes drawn-out problems of the individual heroes and probably will lead me too back to the series I've missed on Luke Cage and Iron Fist.

While not as good as the original shows, The Defenders is still a pretty good superhero show that brings all of the Netflix Marvel heroes together in one show (except The Punisher). I have to admit that it wasn't as good as I hoped for a crossover, because most of the original shows were so amazing, but it's still a pretty good show that's absolutely worth watching!