What If ...? review – Nazi-biffing and genderflipping in glorious first MCU animation
“Based on the Marvel Comics.” They always say that, but What If ...?, the fourth TV series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is visibly a comic book in moving-picture form. This is the first of the Disney+ spin-offs to be animated, and it glories in the idea of paper pages coming to life, embracing the sharp shadows, rich palette and poppy vim of the publications that started it all. Energetic and flippant, unlike some modern Marvel productions, which tend towards the exhaustingly epic, this is oldschool, thwack-pow fun.
The new show’s spryness comes from the premise, which takes advantage of the multiverse set up in the most recent Marvel show, Loki, to explore alternative versions of classic stories. Each half-hour instalment starts with a familiar scene that soon diverges. In the first episode, what starts as a shot-for-shot remake of the scene in the 2011 film Captain America: The First Avenger in which Steve Rogers is injected with super-soldier serum ends with Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) getting the treatment instead. She emerges from the lab with a ripped physique, an indestructible shield and a mission to defeat 1940s totalitarianism and the gender assumptions of the day.
The ensuing adventure is a neatly flipped version of the movie. The romantic subplot remains but it’s Rogers, not Carter, who has to be resourceful, to ensure he is not relegated to the status of a plucky spare part. The retro visuals, meanwhile, are matched by the 20th-century sexism Carter must overcome (“Women aren’t soldiers,” sniffs Bradley Whitford’s Col Flynn. “They might break a nail”). She does this by repeatedly punching bad guys in the face. The many dust-ups are accentuated by a half-second of slow motion at the end of each shot, like we’re a kid lingering over a particularly juicy panel in a comic.
Captain Carter’s exploits set out the stall for What If ...? as an invigoratingly inconsequential set of adventures. They are big on action and pleasingly refuse to take the Marvel mythology too seriously. In a later episode in which Shield agents are confronted with Thor’s hammer, one observes that “no one can lift it – not even Jackson. And he does cross-fit.” Then Thor shows up and everyone has a good swoon over his beautiful, lavender-scented hair.
In this anything-goes world, What If ...? can also leap from genre to genre. Apart from Captain Carter biffing the
Nazis, there is a space heist that imagines T’Challa (in what turned out to be Chadwick Boseman’s final performance as the Black Panther) taking the place of Peter Quill as Star-Lord in a Guardians of the Galaxy reboot. There is also a serial-killer whodunnit, in which the Avengers never assemble because someone keeps murdering them, prompting Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) to turn into a sort of one-eyed Poirot.
That episode features Tom Hiddleston as Loki, giving it the same cheesy ham on British toast he brought to his own series. Generally, the less onerous logistics of a cartoon mean A-listers show up to voice their old characters: Jeremy Renner, Mark Ruffalo, Toby Jones, Stanley Tucci and Dominic Cooper are present and audible, along with Atwell, Jackson, Whitford and Boseman. Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson and Chris Evans are among those who didn’t make it. An amusingly pompous voiceover by Jeffrey Wright as the all-seeing Watcher – introducing and concluding each story like Rod Serling on The Twilight Zone, but with more of a pan-universal deity vibe – adds another swoosh of starry gloss.
So What If ...? is canon, but not heavy, continuing a run of Marvel TV shows that refuse to repeat themselves. It occupies a very different space to the feverishly imaginative WandaVision, the resolutely vanilla The Falcon and the Winter Soldier or the impishly complex Loki. Viewers who like a bit of superhero gubbins, but who long since gave up on staying across the nuances of the MCU, can approach What If ...? without trepidation. For dedicated Marvel enthusiasts, on the other hand, What If ...? might feel inessential. But the prospect of speculative fan-fiction with a stamp of approval will be hard to resist – especially when it transports them back to the original source of their obsession.