'The Umbrella Academy' Featurette Educates On Who The Dysfunctional Superheroes Are
What is The Umbrella Academy? Is it just X-Men but with siblings? The latest The Umbrella Academy featurette released by Netflix attempts to educate and explain this dysfunctional family of superheroes at the center of the series based on the comic by My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way.
The Umbrella Academy Featurette
It's a little confusing that Ellen Page, Tom Hopper, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Robert Sheehan, David Castañeda, and Aidan Gallagher would all belong to the same family, but this featurette explains how it all works. Adopted by billionaire industrialist Sir Reginald Hargreeves, the six siblings were raised to become a famous superhero team, which caused them to resent their father. But several years later, they're reunited by his mysterious death and are forced to team up once again to stop the apocalypse — and fight off time traveling assassins played by Cameron Britton, and Mary J. Blige.
So what sets this apart from being just a kooky riff off of X-Men? Page, who starred in the X-Men series, emphasizes the family element, which takes center stage over the typical superhero shenanigans. "It's a story that feels like this very contemporary dysfunctional family amongst a world of fantasy and excitement," Page says in the featurette.
She may be on to something, though, because The Umbrella Academy is getting tons of praise from critics, who call it "refreshingly weird" and "wonderfully bonkers."
Here's the synopsis for The Umbrella Academy:
On the same day in 1989, forty-three infants are inexplicably born to random, unconnected women who showed no signs of pregnancy the day before. Seven are adopted by Sir Reginald Hargreeves, a billionaire industrialist, who creates The Umbrella Academy and prepares his "children" to save the world. But not everything went according to plan. In their teenage years, the family fractured and the team disbanded. Now, the six surviving thirty-something members reunite upon the news of Hargreeve's passing. Luther, Diego, Allison, Klaus, Vanya and Number Five work together to solve a mystery surrounding their father's death. But the estranged family once again begins to come apart due to their divergent personalities and abilities, not to mention the imminent threat of a global apocalypse.
The Umbrella Academy will drop its 10-episode first season on Netflix starting February 15, 2019.