The Umbrella Academy Season 2 - Review

The Umbrella Academy Season 2 - Review. It is difficult to be a member of a large family, especially when you and your siblings were adopted by an eccentric billionaire scientist who brought you home for the sole purpose of testing your unique abilities. 


Not to mention being forced to become a group of superheroes under the name "Umbrella Academy" and then meeting Because of the End of the World. 

However, there are positives: Do not consider for a moment that you have stepped foot in the Commission that monitors the correct progress of the space-time continuum and we overlook the fact that the lunar asteroid that crashed both on Earth and in the work of his sister Vanya, the family is reunited and thanks to your brother Five you have escaped the great boomjump in time before dying terribly ... what can go wrong again?

OMG we come back again

The second season of The Umbrella Academy continues where the previous one was, with the intention of the Hargreeves brothers to escape an irreversibly committed timeline, managing to save themselves and the entire world through broken headphones. 

Therefore, the whole family is found. projected in the 1960s, in Dallas. Years full of character and charm, even if only the apocalypse, this time personified by a sincere rain of atomic warheads, seems to have reached the Umbrella Academy also in this timeline. 

However, not everything is lost, after having witnessed (again) the end of the world, thanks to his powers, Five manages to go back a week, with the aim of reuniting and alerting his family to avoid (again!) The destruction of the planet. 

It is not a simple task to reunite the Hargreeves family, let alone make them think: each member of the strange family has, in fact, a strong propensity to get into trouble, to maintain dangerous ties, not excessively perhaps, but enough to to affect correct execution of events.


Therefore, it is highly likely that the mere presence of the Umbrella Academy outside of its membership time may trigger a nefarious chain of events.

If reading these lines has a sense of Already seen, you can be sure, you are not alone. The desire to place the protagonists in a kind of temporary vicious circle with a destructive result is certainly desired by the writers, however, during the course of the vision, attention can only fall in front of a canvas from the taste very similar to from the first season. 

In addition, the development of the plot sometimes seems too diluted, weakening the rhythm of the episodes. The smoothness of the series is not totally penalized: all ten episodes are fluid general and keep interest alive, but more thanks to the secondary actors than to the development of the events that involve them. 

If the first season in summary managed to have excellent fluency juggling many successful events and subplots, this second season loses its edge and cannot replicate the excellent result obtained with past episodes.

Although it makes little sense to compare the original material from which the Steve Blackman series is inspired by the series itself, it is good to note that the first season of Umbrella Academy was to fish for characters and themes from the first two volumes of the comic, managing to weave them wisely and find space to add totally new meat to the fire and it is very strange, therefore, this second season decides to trust only about ten pages always belonging to the second volume and completely or almost completely ignoring the rest of the imaginative work of Gerard Way and Grabriel. 

Not that the authors feel compelled in any way to follow in the footsteps of the graphic novel by Dark Horse.But it is clear that there were some difficulties in terms of production in terms of writing and it certainly would have been useful to continue adapting the narrative cues from the comic in a decline suitable for the television counterpart.

7 is the perfect number

What the program continues to do quite well is the treatment of personalitieshe. This is not a small merit because the paper counterpart, until now at least, has never focused much on thoroughly describing the Hargreeves family, while the television series has shown itself capable of creating a very solid background for everyone of the brothers and sisters that make up the Umbrella Academy. 

Despite some pitfalls and some more sloppy characters (especially Luther), even in these new ten episodes it's easy to empathize with supporting actors, thanks also to actors' performances ranging from enough to great. 

Ellen Page should be the star, actually being the most experienced and famous actress on the lot, and well portraying Vanya, who is nonetheless clouded by Five's charisma, who is not only the most successful characterand multifaceted, but also one of the best performed, thanks to a young but perfect Aidan Gallagher who manages to perfectly impersonate a XNUMX-year-old adult forced into the body of a teenager, while Colm Feore brings to the screen an irresistible and magnetic Reginald Hargreeves, despotic adoptive father for the exceptional intellect that still haunts his children's nightmares and dreams. 



Honorable mention for Robert Sheehan, who with Klaus manages to conquer the public, although forced to play a too monotonous role. Quantity and quality, therefore, go hand in hand. 

In this case and despite the defects mentioned above, the series entertains from start to finish thanks to the skill of the cast and the chemistry between the actors, the true pride of the production.

The Umbrella Academy "faces the end of the world in 3 minutes ...

Dallas

Visually, this season affects less than the previous one, but remains properly packaged in almost all fields. 

Pastel colors and a good construction of the sets, although too small, manage to convey the atmosphere of an America in its early 60s, touching characters and themes of the time, sometimes even simply touching them but searching and almost always manages to deceive the viewer that they have really traveled through time. 

However, this second batch of episodes does not forget the most histrionic and absurd tone that characterizes the series, inserting exaggerated and deliberately grotesque elements in a quite skillful but too restricted way. 

It would be really desirable for the future of the series to be able to find a balance right on this front, to be able to find your complete square and permanently perforate the screen.

The ironic and more epic tones are constantly merging: the super heroic cut remains, but at the same time it is never taken completely seriously, with gags that break the beat, even too often, during the stress scenes. 

Greater care would be appreciated in the action scenes, which are also too repetitive and mechanical in almost all cases, but still well implemented and distributed during work. 

The same cannot be said for the more intimate or emotional scenes that often follow a standardized pattern and are characterized by a famous musical success in the background, but almost overwhelming towards the script, and too free use of slow motion, what that makes moments that are too fine in themselves and capable of lengthening the minute to describe characters or situations, along with a host of special effects and shaky CGI. 

The Umbrella Academy, however, manages to be more than the sum of its parts also in this sense, delivering to the publica product absolutely not without defects but even more than pleasant.

Team zero

Unfortunately, the second season of The Umbrella Academy is not entirely convincing, the plot is too linear, despite playing around with time travel again, with the exception of some well-managed twists and original solutions that, especially in the final, will manage to keep you curious about the likely third season. 

Whether you are a comic fan or not, you will find it very predictable most of the time and there will be less ingenuity than in the first season, however there is no shortage of really guessed scenes and exchanges of jokes, never really perfect or wisely calibrated as in the past, but always able to entertain. 

What is certain is that the potential of the series is not properly exploited and even if some important narrative knots develop, one has the perception that nothing really moves and remains too static, giving the feeling that "it makes a lot of noise for nothing". 

A real shame because the characters and the situations would have much more to say than what appears in this second television version of The Umbrella Academy.

In any case, the most interesting thing when it comes to the subject of superheroes is what is hidden under the mask, in the alter ego that lives everyday life through its most human and fragile aspect and in this Netflix series still it handles very well , making the characters much less "super" but somehow much more "heroes". 

Therefore, this season's less brilliant writing is offset by the charm and strength of the Hargreeves family, which manages to save not only Earth but the entire series as well.

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