Atlantis - Telemon

"What's fanservice?"

Episode 3 of Atlantis gets back to the pillars of its appeal: gorgeous costumes, tortured OST romance, and well-oiled gladiatorial fanservice. There's an Amazon in the mix for the boys, but she gets killed pretty early and I'm getting the feeling that I'm not 100% in the target audience here.

Still, target audience or not, there's enough that isn't muscular pretty boys for me to still enjoy it. Jason and Ariadne and their pointlessly tragic romance (although I believe that learning he is Pasiphae's son would drive him evil, since he doesn't have much personality of his own) may be about as interesting as paint, but Pythagoras and Hercules make the show. This episode, it's primarily Pythagoras and his investigation into the mysterious Telemon, a foreign prince intent on marrying Ariadne, and who is almost certainly up to no good.

Utopia - Series 1

It's very yellow, isn't it.

A big hit last year (although I've only caught up with it recently thanks to 4OD making series one available while series 2 is showing, Utopia is a conspiracy thriller which premiered on Channel 4.

The series, which centres on the manuscript for the 'lost' second volume of a fictional graphic novel called Utopia, is notable for its use of stark, brutal violence, including an extremely controversial sequence in which an assassin murders two teachers and (offscreen) half a dozen children in order to frame another child for the killings. It is a far from pleasant series, and as is the nature of such material, the question arises: Is it good enough to earn the use of such shocking content, or is it purely there to shock? In all honesty, I'm not convinced that the level of violence, or the nature of the violence, was entirely necessary. It isn't completely gratuitous, and can't take away from the fact that the story is gripping and compelling, but it sours the experience.

The main narrative is excellent, however, telling the story of a group of enthusiasts who meet through a comics forum centred on Utopia, and are invited to see the manuscript for volume 2. However, the manuscript contains information wanted by an extra-governmental conspiracy called the Network, and the characters are soon on the run from the Network's killers and framed for all manner of appalling crimes.

The central group are IT consultant Ian (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), medical student and would-be conspiracy theory postgraduate Becky (Alexandra Roach), geek survivalist Wilson Wilson (Adeel Akhtar) and obnoxious-yet-artistic eleven year old Grant (Oliver Woollford). Their main lifeline is Jessica Hyde (Fiona O'Shaughnessy), the author of Utopia's sociopathic daughter, and their enemies include Arby (Neil Maskell), a compassionless yet almost childlike killer who is Jessica's equally dark reflection, and Corvadt Biological Sciences, a corporation run by Letts (Stephen Rea) and his assistant (James Fox).

The latter two are something of an anomaly in the series, being pretty stereotypical villains in smart suits plush offices, while little else follows any such conventional patterning. Jessica Hyde would be the hero of a more conventional series, but O'Shaughnessy's dead-eyed performance turns her into an anti-villain, a cold-blooded survivalist devoid of emotion or attachment, and Maskell's turn as Arby has a weird dissonance between his brutal actions and his soft, placid expression. The actual 'heroes' are typically ineffectual and indecisive, and frequently wrong. Moreover, only one of them is actually entirely what he appears to be.

Utopia series 1 is a starkly brilliant piece of storytelling, which works to remove the glamour which has come to adhere to killers in fiction, but in the end is marred by the violence which is in part its purpose. I will be giving series 2 a shot, but I'm not convinced I'll make it through.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

I love this version of the poster

I never expected to enjoy Captain America. He's one of those superheroes, like Superman, who is just so uptight that he's not a lot of fun, and besides, every other film version has sucked mightily.

The First Avenger blew me away. It might not have been ground-breaking as a movie, but it blasted through what I thought I knew about Captain America. It played the origin almost identically to the 1990 Albert Pyun version - that's right, Bad Movie lovers; Albert Pyun made a Captain America movie - but with just enough changes to make the difference. Weakling Steve Rogers wasn't a wannabe hero anymore, he was a hero constrained by his physique, and once he became a super soldier he was shown to be heroic, but also human, with flaws and humour just like anyone else. The Avengers built on this characterisation, and brought us up to the point of The Winter Soldier.

Spoiler free to start with: The Winter Soldier is an action movie, but it is also a post-Cold War Cold War conspiracy thriller. It's watchwords are 'trust no-one', although its moral is actually to trust in people, and its calling card is betrayal. The casting of Robert Redford, erstwhile poster boy for the fight against corrupt governments (All the President's Men, Three Days of the Condor) as a slick politician is a clear nod to its origins.

Other new faces in the film are Sam Wilson/Falcon (Anthony Mackie), very nicely pitched as a scarred veteran soldier who happens to be black, Agent 13/Sharon (Emily VanCamp), and Brock Rumlow (Frank Grillo), while Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson and Cobie Smulders return as SHIELD agents Nick Fury, Natasha Romanoff and Maria Hill. Toby Jones and Jenny Agutter also reappear in smaller roles as Emil Zola and the unnamed British World Security Council representative. This is a pretty sizable ensemble, and yet everyone gets their moment.

The spoilery stuff will start after two more paragraphs.

The plot of the movie follows Steve Rogers as he uncovers a conspiracy woven throughout SHIELD, and plot which threatens to bring about total world domination. It falters a little on the occasions when you wonder why in the name of Stan Lee this isn't worth assembling some form of team for the purposes of, perhaps, a little avenging, but that's a minor quibble and can actually be taken care of through fridge logic: Tony Stark has (publicly at least) blown up all of his suits and had his chest reactor removed; Bruce Banner is presumably in seclusion; and Thor is being as subtle as he can be. We can only presume that Hawkeye is sufficiently undercover that even he doesn't know where he is.

We bounce from set piece to set piece with just enough quiet time to get caught up and see what's happening, just as an action thriller ought to be. There is also some musing on identity and loss, which is brief, but surprisingly poignant.

And now, the spoilery stuff.

Much of the film actually approaches cinematic perfection. In particular the quieter moments transcend what could be trite material to be quite touching, especially when Natasha is questioning her own identity after years of assumed roles. I also applaud moving the character out of the fanservice zone, putting her in formal suits and casuals away from the trademark catsuit.

Speaking of costume, I loved the switch back to the original fighting uniform to signal Cap's commitment to an ideal instead of a pragmatic cause, and Falcon's flight suit was a thing of beauty. The Winter Soldier was chillingly realised by the somewhat baby-faced Sebastian Stan, even if he could have had his own Image Comics title in the nineties with that look.

If I were more of a comics geek than I am, I would probably have suffered some sort of terminal nerdgasm. I'm not sure, but I suspect that pretty much every named character was either reappearing from an earlier film, or has a long and venerable history in the comics, down to the naming of Stephen Strange as on of Insight's prime targets. I strongly suspect that you would find the same if you were able to read every target name that flashed up on screen (I was watching in 3D and barely caught 'Anthony Stark').

On the downside, The Winter Soldier does something that The First Avenger impressively avoided, and many of the larger ensemble succumb to second hero syndrome in the finale, wherein the loyalist SHIELD agents basically exist to confirm the extent of the HYDRA infiltration and the Winter Soldier's reversion to mission by getting slaughtered in droves. I think my only other criticism is that I really wanted it to be 13, not Falcon, who put Rumlow on his arse, because anyone that macho just has to be taken out by a tiny blonde.

Oh, and that the climax of the movie would have been rather more tense if we hadn't seen the Insight helicarriers crashing in flames all over the trailers.

The film has a dramatic effect on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, signalling as it does the end of SHIELD; it will be interesting to see what it does with that. I am particularly looking forward to next week's episode of Marvel's: Some Guys on a Plane.