Loki: The Best Marvel Series So Far (Review)
Loki: The Best Marvel Series So Far (Review)
The new MCU-spinoff fantasy shines with the spectacular debut of Owen Wilson, the perfect partner of the phlegmatic Tom Hiddleston Loki.
Marvel goes Terry Gilliam mode! No need to start waving your arms. It’s understood that Loki – which debuts this Wednesday on Disney Plus – doesn’t have the same subversive ambition, but there is clearly something Brazil and Time Bandits in this third Marvel Universe spinoff for the Disney Plus platform.
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A sci-fi delirium in the midst of the fantasy saga, which funnily fits into the middle of the films of the franchise. At the same time completely improbable, and so delectable. We thus find Thor’s brother, in the wake of Avengers: Endgame. Right after the team of the future went back in time to slip into the battle for New York. Taking advantage of the general chaos, Loki escaped thanks to the Tesseract and altered, suddenly, the course of history, that of the “Sacred Timeline”, an eternal temporal flow created by three mysterious divine creatures at the origin of everything: the Keepers of Time …
Having trouble keeping up? It’s normal! Marvel suspected that the introduction of VAT was going to boil the brains of MCU aficionados. So Michael Waldron (a former Rick and Morty ) wrote a very didactic first episode, taking a communicative pleasure to present to us this “mindfuck” branch of the Marvel Universe which suddenly grows.
With his assumed wacky tone, Loki turns the Avengers saga upside down on a cellular level. The series dares. And spectacularly. In that sense, it’s definitely closer to the grain of WandaVision craziness than the all-action Falcon and the Winter Soldier. But above all, Loki sets foot in the dish of SF with jubilation bordering on hysteria. The Time Variance Authority questions everything, and it does so with insolent, fascinating flippancy. Well helped by its major asset: the duo Tom Hiddleston / Owen Wilson. The fetish actor of Wes Anderson bursts the screen as soon as he enters the scene. From Loki’s first minutes, he steals the show from the title hero, and it took at least his chat skills to create such alchemy with the God of Malice. Because Tom Hiddleston has lost none of his British phlegm, his mocking sense of repartee, in short, his playfulness. Over a multitude of epic exchanges, at the crossroads of philosophy and metaphysics, this bromance takes Marvel to another dimension.
But they don’t just gossip. The pair takes us (we saw the first two episodes) in a mad hunt through the ages, playing with the past, the present, the future, never forgetting that this Loki is that of 2012, alias the villain of the first Avengers, not yet patched up with his brother. The Redeemed Loki died in Infinity War (2018). So the series plays with the character’s perfidy, his Machiavellian approach to any relationship. Never entirely trustworthy, never really bad after all, this Loki is the most complex, arguably the most interesting character in Marvel right now.
So with all that, by dint of juggling time, with the chronology, with the characters and the DNA of the MCU, one wonders how the franchise will manage to get back on its feet. Perhaps that’s why Michael Waldron is also the screenwriter of the highly anticipated Doctor Strange 2, which will hopefully be the bridge between the madness of the Disney Plus series and the movie saga.
