As Adepticon 2026 came to a close and Star Wars: Legion officially enters the next stage of its lifecycle, I find myself looking back. Not at the tournament itself, of course, where after an entire season spent playfully “boasting” about my win streak and my sick Longshanks rating, I managed to once again get only one win on the final day to land at a comfortable 52nd place with my “cheating” Grievous Wheel Bike list, but on more of a “big picture” question. There are only so many ways we can entertain ourselves in these short lives of ours, and as I sit here in the lonely Delta departures terminal of Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport, I’ve decided that it’s finally time to come clean.
I completely regret every dollar and every second I’ve spent on the utter travesty that is Legion, and I owe it to all of you to explain why.
Overrated
Anyone who knows me or has read/listened to my “content” knows that I wouldn’t say such a thing lightly, but at a certain point a man has to face the facts. When I got into Legion in 2010, I was promised an experience that was full of colorful characters, excitement, and action that I could experience while out with friends, and (eventually, when it released) even at home whenever I wanted. But what does it really offer the suckers who buy into it? Drollery, predictability, and a smaller bank account. I was duped, and while a skeptic may say I should have known better, I would argue that good people should simply expect more out of a product that asks for their time and money. So, I’ve decided to write this article to explain why, and I’ll let the readers decide for themselves how trustworthy the opinion of this talking head truly is.
Let’s get one thing out of the way first. This is an article about Legion, so by definition we’re going to have to cover some touchy topics such as the nature of fatherhood, American gun culture, and of course the Epicurean paradox. It makes us question not only how an all-powerful, benevolent God can co-exist with a world that is marred by countless acts of evil and cruelty, but whether that God would truly look back and punish those he created for engaging in such acts when his own Divine Will was indeed the very thing that enabled them to do so. I don’t expect everyone reading this to be in the mood to consider these things, but I’m mentioning them up front so I don’t mislead you about what you’re in for if you continue reading about my thoughts on Legion.
Enough preamble though, let’s get into it.
I knew I was in trouble from the very first line, which I have copied here verbatim:
When I was a little girl, my mother
would remind me each night before
bed to be sure to open my heart to
God, for he was kind, merciful and
just. Things changed after my
father left a few years later,
leaving her to raise me and my
brothers alone in a little place
out on the edge of the Mojave
Desert. She never talked about a
kind and merciful God again.
Instead she spoke of a prophecy.
Of a time when all the world would
be covered in darkness and the fate
of Mankind would be decided. One
night I finally got up the courage
to ask my mother why God had
changed, why was he mad at his
children. “I don’t know,” she
said, tucking the covers around me,
“I guess he just got tired of all
the bulls***.”
I am not a screenwriter, but just as any amateur could tell you that a person actively receiving chest compressions “isn’t doing very well” I feel comfortable in stating that beginning a movie with a prophecy is an unforgivable act of literary violence. The narration is from our film’s deuteragonist Charlie (Adrianne Palicki, whose performance in Legion poured the “probably should stick to television” cement that would later harden after her forgettable role in John Wick), who is of course pregnant with a child that is the subject of some other prophecy. It’s this latter one, suggesting that her child will grow up to be some kind of a John Conner-esque savior of mankind, that drives the actual events of the movie. We will learn about this important detail when Legion is mostly over.
The actual film begins in medias res as Michael (an archangel played by Paul Bettany, who impressively regards the camera with a calm, dismissive contempt for the entire runtime) crashes into a dark and rainy alleyway, sporting a sick buzz cut and a single trail of blood running down his brow. He immediately and dramatically stretches out his arm to display that his knife (and as we later see, his chest) is covered with a kind of pseudo-latin-Bibley sort of nonsense script, the first of many screenshots from Legion that would find equal purchase as cover art for a Slipknot album. He cuts off his own wings and we see a huge collar fall off his neck. Then, in a sequence that is nearly as impatient as it is inexplicable, he raids a SWAT armory that is seemingly in the middle of an abandoned warehouse, packs two duffel bags full of M-16’s, and explodes out of a perfectly functional door, leaving a comical flaming crucifix-shaped hole in the wall.
I knew you wouldn’t believe me so here
“It’s starting,” he begins as he is confronted by a couple of beat cops, “there isn’t much time.” Thankfully he is right; the movie runs at a blessedly brisk 100 minutes, but this dialogue does less than nothing to fill us in on what the hell is going on. Things get even more confusing when one of the officers starts doing the “scary movie face morphing thing” (a visual that was unsettling when it was first done in the excellent horror film Jacob’s Ladder but like a screenshot of a screenshot of a JPEG has only gotten worse with each iteration) then turns into a…zombie…devil…vampire (?)…possessed by an angel demon? It’s never quite clear what’s going on with the mob-type enemies this movie will eventually throw at us by the dozen (but not too many at once, lest the bad guys be given an actual chance to win mind you), but what’s immediately clear is that they are slightly less threatening than a handful of Captain Crunch is to the roof of one’s mouth.
We then spend some time meeting our film’s also-rans, by which I mean the entirety of the remaining cast. The aforementioned Palicki, who was wrapping up her stint of “relative fame” by starring in Friday Night Lights (the show), is mildly smitten with Lucas Black’s character, whatever his name is. Ok, actually I’m glad I just looked it up. His name is Jeep.
This is a picture of a black Jeep that is currently up for sale in Lucas, Texas. This still image and this accompanying text are far more engaging than anything about Jeep, played by Lucas Black, whose accent in this multi-million dollar motion picture is only roughly Texas-ish, despite the film taking place in California.
Anyway, Jeep isn’t too smart a guy. Lucas Black after all had reached the age where playing a daft teenager (Friday Night Lights The Movie, and Fast 3: Tokyo Drift) was getting less believable and thus had to flip to daft 20 somethings before flipping not-long-after this to playing very few things at all (apart from his cameos in later Fast and Furious films which are slightly more well-deserved than Sam Worthington’s continued involvement in the Avatar franchise.) There are other people present at the diner as well, including Jeep’s father whose name I will not look up, but was played by Dennis Quaid in what was nearly his last foray with a wide-release film. Tyreese Gibson, who weirdly probably has the biggest career earnings of the entire cast, thanks to his presence in the Fast & Furious movies that are actually entertaining (sorry again Lucas Black), is also present. There are others, they will be dead soon, however, and are not worth mentioning otherwise.
Quickly, we are treated to a scene where a foul-mouthed granny, the cinematic cousin of the “rapping granny” and the “lascivious boy-crazy granny” crashes the crappy roadside diner (called Paradise Falls…yeah) where the pregnant Charlie works alongside Jeep (LOL, sorry) and his dad, Father of Jeep. She chews on raw steak, says some mean things, and then sprouts pointy teeth before crawling on the ceiling and checking various other horror movie boxes. Because he is not a real man yet, Jeep hesitates to shoot her when he has the chance. We now understand why Jeep is not the father of Charlie’s child: his inability to fire on a crazed geriatric woman demonstrates that he is utterly incapable of fathering a child at all. His character will later demonstrate growth and masculinity by learning to be brave enough to operate a firearm.
Jeep outta read Deuteronomy 23:1 if he doesn’t have the guts to shoot this woman down like she’s a skeet at the range
Michael (props to Bettany for keeping his career going after this one btw) arrives with his duffel bags full of weapons and continues to say cryptic things rather than explaining the actual situation, frustrating the audience and the characters in roughly equal measure. “Don’t do anything brave,” he whispers to Charlie as he hands her a large caliber pistol, though presumably he could just as easily have been addressing the director, whose name I have declined to investigate.
What follows is the nadir of the film, which is to say, the middle 80% of it. Halfway through the movie (the ideal point for exposition) we discover that Michael had been assigned to kill Charlie’s baby (who is going to eventually become mankind’s next savior) but decided to play hooky, and God is quite upset about it! In an effort to rectify the situation, the all-powerful deity who created the heavens, the earth, and all the life upon it, has sent a handful of low-IQ humans without superpowers to take care of the single thing that threatens his long-term plans. A parade of ghoulies who still simply cannot decide what type of monster they are (we can add gangly spider people and creepy kids to the aforementioned zombie/vampire/devil/angel/regular people pentagon of cliches now) lumber, drive, and stalk their way toward the diner in waves that are exactly as “quick” and “numerous” as is necessary to ensure that they have absolutely no chance of coming out on top. Imagine any movie fight where the hero is up against ten dudes at once, but nine of those dudes are waiting their turn until the one other dude is finished fighting the hero. The “last stand” at the diner is that concept stretched into about 60 minutes of runtime.
I keep looking at it and I swear his pants get longer too
Embarrassingly, these inept creatures of the night (?) manage to kill everyone except Michael, Charlie, Jeep, and Father of Jeep, but not before the baby is born. The film’s actual antagonist (the Archangel Gabriel, played by Kevin Durand in one of many many “that guy” roles) arrives and displays his sick God-Of-War-esque angel powers and technology, ones that Michael presumably could have found useful if he didn’t cut his wings off like a freakin’ moron. Gabriel then kills Michael (twist!) and threatens to finish off Charlie and not-son of Jeep, but they are saved by Father of Jeep, who explodes the diner out of frustration that he was too competent to have been killed by the other creatures. Our heroes then crawl out of a car that had rolled a dozen times from a careening crash with a few scrapes, along with a completely unharmed neonate (who was completely unrestrained), a feat that is strangely less believable than the rest of the movie. They are soon nearly killed by a pursuing Gabriel, but not before Jeep notices that his skin is now covered in the same biblical pseudoscript Michael’s was, a plot point that blessedly receives no further attention. But who is that, descending from the heavens?!
I engaged in a twisted exercise when I captured this image for the article: wondering what was going through Kevin Durand’s head while this still was taken. It is a dark place, I shan’t be going back again.
Michael is back! DOUBLE TWIST! It turns out that this was all a test and that God is very upset at Gabriel for following orders. He was supposed to do what Michael did: disobey the singular voice of absolute authority in the known universe. Gabriel leaves slightly less dejected and confused than the audience, and we are treated to Paul Bettany, in his first display of actual emotion, grinning ear to ear that his role in the film is complete. The remaining characters in the film (two people who peaked in different iterations of Friday Night Lights) then drive off into the sunset with the savior of mankind in a car full of guns. We are to presume that the TRUE battle for humanity begins here.
As the film’s very profound initial quote is repeated, however, questions begin to surface. If God changed his mind, then why is there still a battle to fight at all? Was a devil of some kind ever actually involved in this situation? I hesitated, then relented to look up whether the makers of this film, which managed to turn a profit despite being dumped into the January that followed the release of the aforementioned “Sam Worthington” movie Avatar, had planned for a sequel. Thankfully they did not, but I was shocked to discover that the story was continued in a Syfy Channel show called Dominion that aired for two seasons before predictably and thankfully ending this fiction forever. It follows not-son of Jeep as he comes to terms with his destiny, a feat made harder when Jeep himself dies in the first episode. As far as I can tell, Jeep did not father any little Jeeps of his own, and I think we all know why.
The existence of this image, and the works of fiction that inspired it, is ironically a sign that perhaps it would be deserved if it really did happen to us
So there you go, when I think about it all over again, I truly do think that Legion was the worst $20 and 100 minutes that I have spent in my life, and I (unlike Jeep) am man enough to admit that. If you, too, think that Legion is a shameful waste of time, then please do send this link to everyone you know, especially your gaming friends who may unwittingly be attracted to the fantastical setting and the promise of the sort of pseudo-Biblical violence that is quite popular in the grand scheme of tabletop wargames. A good friend won’t let them get duped like I was though. You should explain to them that, while they will very likely continue to enjoy a game featuring angelic violence like Trench Crusade or Age of Sigmar, they should stay far, far away from Legion.
