Summary
Wonder Man is the most atypical Marvel series you can imagine, and yet it’s profoundly improved by all the ways it rejects expectations.
What if a Marvel series had none of the things that people have come to expect from a Marvel series? Before Wonder Man, that didn’t seem like a question worth asking, let alone trying to answer. But in light of Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Guest’s rather lovely little show, the answer reveals itself to be surprisingly obvious – you get one of the best-acted and most quietly impressive stories in the entire MCU.
I’m as surprised as you are. And yet in blitzing through the eight half-hour episodes of Wonder Man, released all at once on Disney+ without a modicum of fanfare, it’s clear that all of the conventions that this story rejects – superhero theatrics, expensive VFX, smug know-it-all humour, nudge-nudge-wink-wink canonical connections, et al – improve this show by their absence. Freed from these trappings, it has the space to be a surprisingly tender take on friendship, family, belonging, and ambition, a scathing critique of the very film industry that has been kept financially afloat by movies in this very franchise, and a ringing endorsement of art and what it has to say about the human condition.
Again, I’m as surprised as you are.
The premise is simple enough to grasp. Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, playing almost the diametric opposite of the one-note villain he played in Aquaman) is a struggling Hollywood actor who is talented but can rarely get a job and fails to keep any that he does get. He fancies himself a passionate auteur who can relate to every character he plays on a fundamental level, but the people he’s working for, who have deadlines to meet and content to churn out, think his rigorous approach is annoying. This has stalled his career, and the stalled career has led to fractures along the faultlines of his personal and familial relationships.
To Simon, a remake of the classic superhero movie Wonder Man represents both a career lifeline and the chance to make good on promises made long ago, to himself and to his father, with whom he watched the flicks as a child. When he auditions, he meets Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley, reprising his role from various MCU projects, including most notably Iron Man 3 and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings). Slattery is best known for “playing” the Mandarin, and he’s still trying to slip the shackles of being known as a conman, even though his burgeoning mentor relationship with Simon is, at least initially, a performance in itself.
This is because Trevor has been strong-armed by the Department of Damage Control – represented primarily through Arian Moayed’s Agent Cleary, played almost identically to how he played Stewy in Succession – into spying on Simon. The DODC has had its eye on him since he was a kid and survived a house fire that should have killed him; in adulthood, he’s keeping his superpowers quiet, since Hollywood has implemented a ban on superpowered individuals working on-set after a disaster. So determined is Simon to further his acting career that even by the end of the season, we don’t have a clear sense of what his powers even are, though there are admittedly some strong implications best left as surprises.
This fact should let you know that superpowers are not on Wonder Man’s agenda. Instead, it’s hyper-focused on the relationship between Simon and Trevor, which consistently evolves into a deeply earnest, almost parental friendship, and on examining the creation of art on stage and screen from the inside looking out. Trevor turns out to be exactly what Simon needs: a supportive pal and mentor who has been enmeshed so deeply and for so long in the art of performance that he can offer the kind of sage wisdom Simon needs to hear to keep his career on track.
But where Wonder Man really excels is in its examination of process. This is a show with a deep and abiding love of cinema and storytelling, and it presents the journey of an idea from errant brainwave to written line to living, breathing performance as though it’s charting the life cycle of a lifeform, which in a way it is. This manifests as several quietly remarkable scenes of performance, from early audition tapes to on-set final takes, blurring the lines between where these characters and the ones they’re playing for various roles begin and end. It’s a surprisingly brilliant exploration of how art comes to be, and the power it can hold over those who perform and witness it.
There’s no doubt that this doesn’t feel especially fitting for an MCU show. It’s similarly inevitable that many people will check this out on the back of brand association and find themselves utterly bamboozled by it, wondering how this strange little show has found its way into the thumbnails alongside, say, Secret Invasion, or Daredevil: Born Again. But why not? It’s all art, at the end of the day.
RELATED:
