Heroes Reborn Blu-ray Review: “A messy, overly melodramatic disappointment”

From 2006 onwards, Tim Kring’s Heroes certainly captured the imagination with a fun and different Sci-Fi series where the narrative led us down an intriguing path. Although an unexpected revival, Heroes Reborn did perk up the ears of interest with a hope that we’d get something fresh again. Unfortunately, and with regret, the new series is far from that early originality. The overall result is messy with an excess of story-line-jamming alongside hugely over-dramatic acting from some of the newcomers. Saying this, it’s not all doom and gloom as the latter episodes do hone their focus but by then you don’t care what happens to anyone.

Heroes Reborn sets us up by showing us a stadium-sized gathering of all the folks with their unique, other-worldly abilities in Odessa, Texas. The classic panning shot of people showing off their invisibility or superior cake-making (one of these isn’t true) gives us a little insight and suggests the world is a better place to where it used to be… i.e. when they hated our original Heroes. However, as you’ll guess, people are still scared of the unknown much like the modern world and a lot of people are killed in an explosion. You could say Heroes Reborn is reflecting peoples’ attitude towards other cultures – whereas TV always shows us that people just want to kill each other, which isn’t necessarily true unless you want it to be. Anyway, the stadium blows up, we don’t know who did it, chaos reigns, people perish, questions are asked and we end up joining the fallout a year later.

So with our people with ‘extraordinary abilities’ on the run, or hiding in plain sight, the new adventures begin except this time we’re thrown more information than any show could possibly need in an opening double episode. Although you can work out what’s going on, I found myself question why we needed every single character instantly. Where’s the mystery? The other problem is that it’s not sure whether it wants to look back and remember the good times or push on with something fresh. Obviously returning viewers would be eager to see the faces of their favourites but the actors who return are thin on the ground and so we’re left with just a scattering of ‘well known’ faces, and let’s be honest, Heroes didn’t have the audience connection like Lost or The X-Files.

There are a few positives though and they begin in the shape of returning character Noah Bennett, played solidly by Jack Coleman, who fights to do the best he can with weak material. I also really enjoyed Kiki Sukezane’s Miko and her Japanese side-line story which looked great, felt smart and gave us a nice twist as it flits between animation, gaming and ‘real’ life – I feel that would have been an interesting episode or short film all by itself. Robbie Kay’s Tommy is also a good character, with Kay echoing Nicholas Hoult somewhat and in all the right ways.  On the flipside, and I’m not one to usually pick out poor performances but Judi Shekoni’s Joanne was really grating and one of those characters you hope doesn’t stick around for long.

Heroes Reborn could have been more cohesive if they’d saved a story for each week and then looped them all together later on. It’s not that there’s too much to follow, it’s just so hollow. Ten years on from that original it has all been done before and more successfully. Overly melodramatic, lacking heavily in conviction and in the words of The Stranglers there’s [thankfully] no more heroes anymore…

Heroes Reborn arrives on Blu-ray and DVD on 9th May.