The MCU has been known to bring out big and expansive films that show many different superheroes in their own exciting and character-driven journeys. So it seems to be a surprise that the ever-so-large superhero franchise decided to give us smaller bite-sized adventures based on some of the MCU’s most popular side characters in the form of short Disney+ mini-series. The first one to tackle this idea would be WandaVision which brings two well-liked MCU characters Wanda Maximoff (Scarlett Witch) and Vision to star in their wacky adventure that while having its issues, has just enough great and interesting ideas to keep the majority of the series afloat.
Taking place a few months after the events of Avengers Endgame, we find ourselves in seemingly the 50’s suburbia of a small town called Westview where Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and her husband Vision (Paul Bettany) learn to adjust to life in their new environment with their superpowers. Little do we know that everything is all an illusion as Wanda has taken over the minds of the people in Westview and has created a reality that keeps changing decades with every passing episode. It’s up to characters like Maria Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) and Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings) to figure out how to stop Wanda’s Rein of power before it goes too far.
Two plots are going on at the same time and it’s great to say that they balance each other very well. The plot with Wanda and Vision living their life as it was a sitcom is in all honesty very interesting seeing as with each passing episode they pay tribute to a different decade of television whether it be sitcoms from the ’50s or the ’80s I never watched any sitcoms from the times this show is referencing but I can tell that they represent each decade very well and you can see the influence from the style of writing to the way the characters act. The second plot is about certain characters trying to stop Wanda's power from consuming the minds of the people from the small town of Westview. This plot is great at bringing the viewer back to reality and you’ll be able to see many different smaller side characters from other MCU projects that all get to interact with each other which is a real treat. The show is great at balancing the two threads together with emotions of laughter and even sadness later on. The only thing that kept this show from being solid though was the third act twist villain as it felt pointless and seemed like a last-ditch effort to add more conflict even though the struggle Wanda goes through dealing with greif would have been more than enough.
Now I liked Wanda and Vision fine enough in the MCU, but this series manages to make them even more likable than ever before with their silly escapades and shocking realizations. Elizabeth Olsen gets her chance to show off what she can do with her acting and it works surprisingly well as she balances the duties of being an easy-going housewife to a grief-stricken person who has a hard time letting go of the past. Vision is also good in this series as he can provide a lot of laughs and even some sentiment later when everything hits the skids. Other characters return such as Maria Rambeau from Captain Marvel and Jimmy Woo from Ant-Man which is really cool and they provide a comical but also likable performance. Even Kat Dennings returns from the first two Thor movies as Darcy who may annoy some people but she honestly never bothered me as i found her comedy sometimes delightful and fun. The only character who did bother me though was the twist villain who I can’t give away because of spoilers, but the villain feels completely pointless and the motives seem very confusing and uninteresting. This is the same problem I had with the twist villain in Iron Man 3. Yeah, I didn’t see it coming, but the reason why they included a twist villain didn’t measure up to the rest of the story.
Now, this is a smaller MCU venture so the cinematography is not gonna have the same amount of size and scope as the movies. Still, I got to give credit that they still did everything possible to make the series visually interesting especially in the WandaVision sequences. As mentioned before, each episode of WandaVision shows a different decade of television and the visuals reflect with many props and backgrounds that reflect the period they are representing. They manage to show the escapades of Wanda, Vision, and others in comedic and over-the-top ways such as when Wanda or Vision have to use their power to get out of scrapes. You may also see the aspect ratio change with every passing episode from 4:3 to 16:9 depending on the decade. The visuals keep getting bigger and bigger and even more action-packed until the final confrontation which I admit is pretty cool even despite the weak twist villain in the mix. The visuals are still pretty impressive on a smaller scale and the MCU knows how to keep things interesting even with some limitations.
Christopher Beck comes to score this Disney+ series after coming off the Frozen films and the Ant-Man films and needless to say he does a phenomenal job of getting the music to feel like the different time periods of sitcoms that WandaVision references. Some of these episodes that take place inside the WandaVision “show” have theme songs to them that are written by none other than Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson Lopez who wrote the songs for the Frozen movies and Pixar’s Coco. each song from the different episodes of WandaVision is catchy and humble as they represent perfectly the time period whether it be the 70’s with their style of music or the early 2000’s with a lot of rock tunes. It’s great to see marvelous talent being put to use to make the music as authentic as possible and man did it pay off so dang well.
WandaVision has a few major problems when it comes to the twist villain and some of its character progression, but the stuff that this show gets right is too great to be ignored. For the MCU’s first mini-series on Disney+, WandaVision is a great start to an already long lineup of many other MCU Disney+ shows to come. Its likable characters, great visuals, outstanding music, and mostly well-told storytelling are more than enough for me to say that this is a show that shouldn’t have worked as well as it did. Even with plenty of things working against the shows favor, I find myself still enjoying the many outstanding things this show has to offer.
(Final Grade B+)