The Defenders

It's unfortunate that most people who go through the trouble of writing IMDb reviews are pretentious, pompous, and hopelessly opinionated. As an effort to offset their negativity and wannabe film buff nonsense, I thought I'd chip in. I took some film classes in college, so I'm not totally ignorant when it comes to filmmaking, but I'm by no means an expert. I'll skip my criticisms altogether and just say that it's not a perfect show. Having said that, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was engaging, suspenseful and fun. The music, setting, acting, cinematography, etc was all pretty solid. It's a superhero show, folks...no one should expect something that rises to the level of 'high art.' There have been only 2 exceptions to that rule that I can think of: the dark knight and legion. Go into this expecting to redefine your view of the universe, and you'll undoubtedly be disappointed. Go into it expecting to be ENTERTAINED and not much else and you should be happy. Also, if you're the type that enjoys poking holes in plots and spotting every error possible, you might have issues....but really, people....it's NOT BASED ON A TRUE STORY. Fiction and especially comic books have the luxury of telling stories unencumbered by facts. They're more like modern day Aesop's fables (which have many plot points that don't make sense btw).

Enjoy it for what it is: Good entertainment.

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.

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!

The fruits of Netflix's four Marvel series' come together quite nicely in this fun, playful team-up series that takes the Defenders name and makes a pretty engaging team out of it. It's a bit daft sometimes, particularly with the whole Elektra revivification arc, but it's enjoyable seeing the various heroes interact and the 8 episodes give it a lean structure and a nice pace. It does a decent job redeeming Iron Fist after his underwhelming first season. He's more likable and exciting here. Gives me hope that his second season might be worth watching.

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!