{"id":927227,"date":"2026-10-14T00:28:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-14T00:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/927227\/"},"modified":"2026-10-14T00:28:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-14T00:28:09","slug":"visionquest-review-paul-bettanys-synthetic-hero-finally-comes-into-focus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/927227\/","title":{"rendered":"VisionQuest review: Paul Bettany’s synthetic hero finally comes into focus"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Bettany\u2019s Vision has never been entirely in focus. Introduced as a late-act twist in one Avengers movie<\/a>, and killed off as a sacrificial lamb in another<\/a>, he has worked largely in the margins of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Bettany forced to mine traces of the character\u2019s beautifully human inhumanity from deep within makeup, facial prosthetics and scripts constantly racing toward a big, explosive climax. Even in the 2021 streaming phenomenon<\/a> that bore his name\u2014and which this week\u2019s VisionQuest serves as a direct sequel to, even more so than 2024\u2019s Agatha All Along<\/a>\u2014The Vision was an accessory character: a ghost trapped in the idiot box; a moving corpse with killing intent. Having finally been given his \u201cown\u201d show at last, Bettany\u2019s former Avenger still threatens to be crowded out at times: Buffeted by a whole sitcom\u2019s worth of mental roommates on the one side, and characters spawned by the necessities of franchise dust-clearing on the other. But with the breathing room of eight hours devoted to his character\u2019s primary-colors mental world, Bettany finally has some real room to work\u2014and to deliver, alongside his old Age Of Ultron co-star James Spader, a fascinating, nuanced, visually compelling meditation on grief, and how it influences the curses and legacies that parents end up transmitting to their children.<\/p>\n

It would be reductive, but not inaccurate, to imagine VisionQuest as a series of concentric circles, with Bettany and Spader\u2019s prickly, funny, fascinatingly complex father-and-son, hero-and-villain, jailor-and-prisoner dynamic at its center. The further out you go from there\u2014through a Windows 95 desktop-patterned mental world populated by cast-off Stark Industries AIs portrayed by a host of well-cast character actors, and then out into the real world, where the detritus of WandaVision and Agatha combines with a Marvel-rote pursuit story starring a \u201cquirky\u201d bounty hunter (Todd Stashwick) who won\u2019t shut up about his stupid \u201ccode\u201d\u2014the worse the series gets. It\u2019s not like there are no pleasures in these outer reaches. Mike Flanagan veteran<\/a> T\u2019Nia Miller shows up halfway through the show\u2019s run to deliver a compelling take on the standard-issue \u201cidealist with rage issues\u201d Marvel villain, and showrunner Terry Matalas is kind enough to sprinkle in a typically hilarious deadpan from Diane Morgan for the Cunk<\/a> heads in the audience. But the further the series moves away from Bettany and Spader, the more clunky the clockwork gets; by the time it\u2019s devoting whole cold opens to a young London conman (Ruaridh Mollica) twitching his way along the breadcrumb trail left by Agatha\u2019s big reveals, it\u2019s easy to imagine you can hear a gear or two getting ready to slip catastrophically out of joint.<\/p>\n

And yet, somehow, they never do. The most obvious reason is Spader: If there is a reason, singular, to watch VisionQuest, it\u2019s to see the veteran actor take grace notes he managed to smuggle in via voicework in Joss Whedon\u2019s overstuffed Age Of Ultron and transmute them into entire songs. Modulating on a \u201cboxed crook\u201d performance he gave for roughly eighty gajillion seasons on The Blacklist, Spader finds an unexpected avuncular warmth within his genocidal AI, who Vision secretly saved at the climax of Ultron\u2019s 2015 trip to the CG explosion factory. Beneath the expected (and genuinely delightful) withering asides and moments of icy menace, Spader\u2014free to use his whole face and body to play the character for once, courtesy of the \u201chuman avatars only!\u201d rule in the mental space where he\u2019s been imprisoned\u2014finds the person lurking beneath the metal and the mayhem. If the version of Ultron that emerged, crooning his creepy little Pinocchio songs, from Whedon\u2019s pen 11 years ago was a wrathful child, taking out his frustrations on the human race, this one is a more introspective teenager; still dangerous, as Spader\u2019s performance never lets you forget. But far more interesting for having the potential to surprise.<\/p>\n

Spader finds an able scene partner in Miller\u2014the two get numerous, fascinating, and sometimes blisteringly ugly scenes together as the series progresses. But he\u2019s especially good opposite Bettany, who plays this version of The Vision as a synthezoid unmoored, teetering on the edge of total dissociation. Bettany doesn\u2019t let the absurdities of plot here get in the way of the emotional realities of the character: WandaVision fans will recall that this Vision is a resurrected, weaponized corpse with memories of an idealized ghost of himself implanted into his synthetic brain, but Bettany believably portrays him as a man who has lost everything, family, friendship, purpose, and self.\u00a0 The Emmy nominee has always been a good fit for Vision, in part because there is something just a tiny bit inhuman about him\u2014an icy distance to Bettany that melts the second he unleashes one of those massive, goofy smiles. Here, more often than not, the latter are absent, or clearly mechanically forced; instead, we get a man\/machine whose discomfort at even being addressed as himself is palpable. It is to VisionQuest\u2019s credit, and Bettany\u2019s, that its title character is frequently unemotive but never unfeeling; the series is, on at least one count, mostly about the pleasures of watching something inside him wind its way to its breaking point, and then beyond.<\/p>\n

All of which is of a piece with the wider goals Matalas has tackled here. It\u2019s interesting, for instance, to note that he\u2019s a newcomer to this \u201cfranchise.\u201d In its most electric moments, VisionQuest sometimes feels like not just a conversation with executive producer Jac Schaeffer\u2019s work on WandaVision and Agatha All Along, but an interrogation of it\u2014and especially its pithy wisdom about grief being \u201clove persisting.\u201d (It acknowledges, for instance, that the recipient of that particular emotional crossstitch wound up being driven so mad by her \u201cpersistent love\u201d that she ended up killing dozens of people and then burying herself under a mountain<\/a>.) The grief of VisionQuest is uglier, if no less undeniable, than that beautiful idea, and intimately tied into the show\u2019s obsession with parents and children, creator and creature. When Bettany\u2019s character struggles, for episodes on end, with whether to embrace Mollica\u2019s possible son-by-spiritual-association as his child, he\u2019s not just quibbling about plot details like \u201cmy enemies might hurt you\u201d; he\u2019s wrestling with whether to pass on the poison that life and loss have injected into his artificial heart. It\u2019s heady, worthy stuff, and the material that best positions VisionQuest as a worthy successor to WandaVision\u2019s complicated legacy.<\/p>\n

Not that it\u2019s all trauma and digital misery here. VisionQuest also shares WandaVision\u2019s interest in formalist experiments and staggeringly gorgeous set design, presenting Vision\u2019s mental world as a sumptuous 1950s dreamscape, filled with beautiful mid-century modern appliances loaded up with silly computer puns. And although it\u2019s not quite the shapechanger that either Wanda or Agatha were, the series still shows a welcome dedication to treating TV episodes as episodes, adhering to a central conceit rather than being just a one-hour chunk of a longer story. (A midseason installment that sees Vision repurpose his mental buddies as the characters in a police procedural is especially fun on that score, as Matalas plays with Schaeffer\u2019s ideas about the ways we use the language of TV to help us understand the world.) Sure, it\u2019s not devoid of the ugly realities of streaming television: Vision, for all that he claims to be a super-genius endlessly running thousands of simulations of every situation, is sometimes forced to act astoundingly stupidly in order to get the show to its next big plot beat. And the Marvel Machine\u2019s need to get one of its post-Endgame characters to actually resonate with audiences is a frequent distraction, mostly just serving to remind the viewer why Bettany and Spader are bona fide movie stars, and their colleagues here are not.<\/p>\n

But those aspects are, of course, the price of entry for any of Disney+\u2019s various Marvel shows over the last half-decade. They\u2019re the hard shell of franchise obligation that has to be gnawed through to get to the rich character and performance meat inside. On that score, VisionQuest is a pleasantly light chew: Smart, affecting, and funny, and buoyed by several serviceable performances\u2014and two or three absolutely stellar ones. It brings this odd little trilogy of TV shows to not just a satisfying conclusion, but a meaningful one; at long last, it gives The Vision the focus a hero of his potential has always deserved.<\/p>\n

VisionQuest premieres Tuesday, October 13 at 9 p.m. ET on Disney+.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Paul Bettany\u2019s Vision has never been entirely in focus. Introduced as a late-act twist in one Avengers movie,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":927228,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344],"class_list":["post-927227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=927227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927227\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/927228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=927227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=927227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=927227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}