- Network: Disney+
- Series Premiere Date: Aug 11, 2021
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Critic Reviews
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“What If…?” might not win over the superhero-averse, but if you’re a fan who has grown a bit fatigued of Disney’s biggest franchise recently, this could be the antidote you’ve been needing.
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Overall What If…? offers an entertaining new take on Marvel continuity that will fill the gap between the main Disney Plus series.
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What If…? is a fun exploration of alternate versions of the MCU, with animation that does a good job of conveying the action that’s baked into the MCU recipe.
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T’Challa’s nobility shines through thanks to Boseman’s commanding presence. Nonetheless, the material’s heart and soul is its central gimmick, and it works just as well when episodes choose to more boldly stray from conventional MCU lore.
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Each of the three half-hour episodes made available for review locked me in with breezy scripts, an agile narrative energy and a mesmerizing, near-photorealistic animations style.
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Energetic and flippant, unlike some modern Marvel productions, which tend towards the exhaustingly epic, this is old-school, thwack-pow fun.
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"What If...?" might be the most Marvel Comics thing that Marvel Studios has done, translating the what-might-have-happened-if comic-book concept from page to screen, with all its geekiness intact. The highly stylized animation and access to key actors enhances the fun, creating an extremely logical Disney+ add-on to an increasingly packed multi-verse.
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The first three installments Disney made available for review pack a lot of fun ideas, drama, humor, eye-popping action and fan-service references into well-balanced half hours.
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A relatively breezy and often humorous series that puts a quirky and borderline goofy spin on the Marvel timeline as we know it.
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It’s fun simply because the level of quality control at Marvel is pretty high these days (give or take that Falcon and the Winter Soldier finale), and because some of the ideas are either inherently appealing or are used to cleverly tweak what we know from the films. But not every installment lives up to the title’s seemingly limitless potential.
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It’s an enjoyable enough series, but it’s probably not going to change your life or upend the cinematic universe in any way, either literally or figuratively.
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Marvel Studios’ first animated series is a stylish narrative experiment with fun twists and surprises — nothing more, nothing less. For the uninitiated, it’s impenetrable.
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“What If…?” has an affable ease and comforting gloss to it, as Saturday morning cartoons are meant to. But the light fun of it is eaten away by the cynicism from within the project, that what purports to be about infinite possibilities is blatantly more about repurposing.
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As it stands, what stands out is not the series’ ambitions or its potential, but its limitations. What If…? promises to be a space for the kinds of weird or challenging or just-plain-silly ideas the live-action properties will never touch — but then, presented with these playful hypotheticals, it can hardly muster enough curiosity to wonder what happens next. Moment to moment, it’s occasionally successful as fan service for diehards.
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While What If…? styles itself as the Twilight Zone of the MCU, it largely feels like the same beats played all over again, but with different characters copy-pasted in each others’ place.
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What If…? is competently made. Like the majority of Marvel Studios’ product, though, it refuses to take any real risks. The action is loud when it needs to be loud, fast when it needs to be fast. But the dialogue is dreary and witless; the animation – 3D graphics styled to look 2D – all too stiff and inexpressive. ... Perhaps the biggest problem has to do with the storytelling. All three of the early episodes have plenty of plot, but no narrative.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 70 out of 117
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Mixed: 17 out of 117
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Negative: 30 out of 117
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Aug 11, 2021
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Aug 13, 2021This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.
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Aug 12, 2021