DC Titans - A Small Review

Recently Watched:

Titans
(Season 1)
(Brenton Thwaites, Anna Diop; TV-MA; 45 min; 2018 - ???)

There might be minor spoilers even though I'll try to avoid spoiling much. 

The Bad: 
1. Color: Starfire isn't orange-ish. 

2. Color: Gar isn't green (and is so far limited in what he changes into). 

3. Color: Robin's costume might as well be grey. Even the super hero shows and movies that I love still darken the colors (except for the Reeve movies) and it drives me crazy. 

4. Grim, Gritty, Edgy, Grimdark: Especially in the first few episodes, this suffers from trying to hard to emulate the Snyder-verse (thus far). It slowly eases off of this in some of the later eps, but even in the finale, it's still trying to damn hard. And it's crazy that they can't get this right, because Daredevil and Jessica Jones provided great pre-existing examples of how you can do grim & gritty supers without going Edgelord Grimdark (ooo, I might have a new album title there). 

5. The Casting: I'm not yet sold on Brenton Thwaites as broody moody why did Bruce do this to me Dick Grayson or Anna Diop's Starfire. It's not that they suck, they just aren't hitting quite the right buttons for me. 

6. Fight Choreography: The truth is simply that 2 excellent seasons of Person of Interest, 3 seasons of Dardedevil and 7 years of Arrow have spoiled me when it comes to street level superhero fight choreography, and Titans just doesn't compare. It's more akin to, say, Buffy fighting (which was solid for a low-budget TV show of the time but that time was . . . sheesh, 23 years ago!) with a dash of the Bourne movie still tossed in. Arrow manages to stage and execute multiple awesome fights every week for 23 weeks a year. And I'm reasonably certain that Titans has at *least* an Arrow budget. 

7. Blood! Blood Everywhere!!  Part of being Edgy & Grimdark is that there has to be a gratuitous use of blood. And at the core, I don't have a problem with that. Street level heroes should see some blood even if they aren't lethal terminating machines. The blood problem in Titans is that there is simply *too* much of it, it's done digitally and poorly, and the people doing it have no fucking clue how blood works. Robin can punch someone in the mouth and the resulting blood splatter is like what you see in a murder mystery when someone is dismembering a body. 

8. Power Levels: One thing that Snyder got right in Man of Steel is the power levels of the characters he was dealing with. But through 11 eps of this, the power levels are just dropped *WAY* too much. I mean, Starfire is supposed to be a fucking powerhouse. Like, go toe-to-toe with Wonder Woman for a bit kind of powerhouse. Donna Troy is a Wonder Woman-level powerhouse. Hell, even Hawk of Hawk and Dove is pretty solid on the scale (yet, here, Hawk and Dove are street-level seemingly unpowered vigilantes). On this, so far, they aren't even CW Supergirl powerhouses. What little we've seen is more akin to Jessica Jones' power level on Netflix. 


The Good: 

1. The Casting: Young Teagan Croft is doing a solid job as Raven. Curran Walters is nailing the asshole that is Jason Todd's Robin. Alan Ritchson (whom you may remember as Aquaman on Smallville is a solid Hawk, and even Minka Kelly doesn't suck as Dove. The stand-out is easily Ryan Potter as superhero fanboy Beast Boy though. He has what I think they call an "easy charm". The best parts of the show featured him. 

2. The Premise of the Dick Grayson Character: The show is not afraid of talking about, and in fact, focuses heavily on, how being a pre-teen boy taken in by and taught the ways of the Batman would probably leave you pretty fucked up in the head. Not only does it address it, it gives up two first-hand perspectives of it. That of Dick Grayson, suffering the mental trauma, maybe even the PTSD of years with the Bat and the exultation of such a life in a kid who has only been doing it for like, a year, and without the initial baggage that Grayson had. 

3. Potential: If the show can move away from the Snyderisms and find it's own voice, I think it has a lot of potential. But right now, when compared to other young people superhero shows like The Gifted, Cloak and Dagger, and Runaways, it's at the tail end of the pack. 

Right now, Titans is rough. It doesn't suck but it could be so, so much more. 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1043813/?ref_=tt_ov_inf