‘Legion’ a marvel that doesn’t feel like a comic book
The most important thing to know about the new FX series “Legion” is not that it’s based on a Marvel comic, but that it was created by Noah Hawley, the novelist who took one of the Coen brothers’ best-known films and gave it its own identity as TV’s “Fargo.”
“Legion,” premiering on Wednesday, Feb. 8, simply doesn’t feel like a comic book show or, really, any other Marvel-based series.
[...] it feels like an unnerving trip down unreliable-memory lane with Franz Kafka as your tour guide.
The series’ OMG opening sequence traces the seeming perfection of his youth from birth to the moments when it all started to unravel.
Hawley, who also directs the series, executes a bravura visual style here, crackling with staccato editing, and, in a matter of minutes, David’s whole early life has flashed breathlessly before us.
[...] it does have a far more complex thematic and psychological structure than most comic book shows.
Every glance, every movement, everything he embodies or does adds to the complex portrait of a deeply haunted young man who has all but reached the point of exhaustion trying to cope with his profound otherness.
Keller, Smart, Bill Irwin as (of course) a scientist and Aubrey Plaza as a drug- and alcohol-addicted fellow patient also hit their marks every time.
David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle and co-host of “The Do List” every Friday morning at 6:22 and 8:22 on KQED FM, 88.5 FM in San Francisco, 89.3 FM in Sacramento.