WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Season 1 of Jupiter's Legacy, now streaming on Netflix.
The live-action Jupiter's Legacy adaptation has finally hit Netflix, signaling the beginning of their deal with Mark Millar. The series' first season, or volume, is a loose adaptation of the comic book, albeit one with some rather drastic changes to the pacing and plot. Most of the focus is on modern-day superheroes, but it should start in a far earlier time period.
The show's flashbacks to how the Union got their powers are much more interesting than its present-day story for a variety of reasons. Given how loose Jupiter's Legacy already is with how it adapted the book's story, keeping the series' first season as a complete period piece may have been a better narrative choice.
The show tells the story of the surviving original members of the superhero team the Union and the next generation of heroes, most of whom are their progeny. The main characters are the long-lived Utopian, Lady Liberty, Brainwave and the former's two children, with the main crux of the drama dealing with Utopian's spoiled celebrity of a daughter and his righteous but faltering son who's stuck in his father's shadow. There are also frequent flashbacks to the late 1920s when the Union first got their powers.
These flashbacks are the highlight of Jupiter's Legacy, as they ooze style and panache in a way that's completely absent in the present-day scenes. The tone is also remarkably different, truly feeling like an accurate period piece. It also captures the slow descent into madness with the future Utopian's mental ailments following events spiraling out of the stock market crash. This makes it feel like anything but a superhero show, and much more of a historical drama meets adventure meets psychological horror.
The super-heroics of the present day, however, fail to be even half as exciting. Many times, they feel generic, with the obvious Superman aspects of Utopian's character only serving to make him seem like a dime-store superhero compared to the world's greatest champion. The occasionally shallow effects and equally as gaudy costumes only further this. Not to mention none of the characters ever seem to have the reverence that they're claimed to possess in the world. This also makes the show's moral questioning of Utopian's code more annoying and trite than philosophical, and his ridiculous musings seem far too cartoony for how serious the show is trying to be.
A solution to this is to have the "present-day" be the heroes' coming out publicly and forming the Union, which would still take place in the late '20s/early '30s. For one, this adds a sense of awe and grandeur to their presence, making their betrayal and later moral questioning in the modern-day all the more tragic. It also serves as the "superhero" section of the series, while flashbacks to just a few months later before the stock market crash could still be used.
This revamp would give better connective tissue between the more interesting pulp horror elements in the flashbacks and the superheroes, all while making said superhero sections much more epic. It isn't exactly how the comic book unfolded, but Netflix's Jupiter's Legacy already made numerous changes to the source material anyway. Even though these are more egregious changes, they would also result in a much better show.
Netflix's Jupiter's Legacy stars Josh Duhamel as The Utopian, Ben Daniels as Brainwave, Leslie Bibb as Lady Liberty, Elena Kampouris as Chloe Sampson, Andrew Horton as Brandon Sampson, Mike Wade as The Flare, Anna Akana as Raikou and Matt Lanter as Skyfox. Season 1 is available on Netflix now.
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