😍 2022-06-19 16:01:58 – Paris/France.
Even if Netflix's sci-fi related productions are plentiful, very few come close to the genre's grittier side. That is to say, there are films and series about time travel ("The Adam Project"), artificially created superheroes ("Power Project") and futuristic action ("Uncovered ”), but it almost always stays at a starting point that dips into action, adventure, or drama with more conventional approaches.
"Spiderhead" attempts to break with this trend. Both plot-wise and aesthetically, the film enters the waters of scientific speculation, which also, as in the best examples of the genre, builds bridges to the present day. However, in its home stretch, it does not dare to fully exploit its premises and the feeling is of a wasted opportunity. Still, the film has a lot of interesting elements.
These are based above all on a series of plot ideas that are put on the table and which are not fully exploited, but they are very interesting. For instance, the most explicit discourses on how chemicals modulate our daily personality in a consensual pact, much more dangerous than it seems at first sight, between pharmaceutical companies and individuals. A problem that is particularly evident in the extremely sedated North American society.
'Spiderhead', based on a story published in 2010 by George Saunders, tells how a group of criminals in a prison (a facility on an island where they roam freely with routines more typical of a vacation period, which makes them sets a weird dystopian tone in the middle) agree to stock up on doses of behavior-altering chemicals. Panic, sexual desire, verbiage… a whole range of forced feelings which will trigger, beyond the rooms where the study takes place, tensions between the prisoners and the doctor who is carrying out the experiments.
Stuck at Ikea
This very frontal message from 'Spiderhead' isn't at all subtle (the movie is literally about it), but Joseph Kosinski, who recently demonstrated his formidable visual skills in 'Top Gun: Maverick', urges him to branches, with a wicked sense of humor, into several darts that work very well. For example, with the adult rock soundtrack that looks like it came out of a Rock FM medley and plays continuously in prison, almost to keep prisoners sedated to the same extent or more than chemicals.
Or the staging that presents us with a prison island halfway between an inhuman brutalist design and an Ikea advertisement, almost a daily prison in which you can live with some normality. Or, finally, the design of the nice personality but with an evil edge of the scientist in charge of the experiments, beautifully played by Chris Hemsworth, and which introduces us to a new type of villain, this kind of nice billionaire style that they are devoted to the ambitious form of the most naive cryptobros.
Between Kosinski and his team they pose a dystopia which is not a dystopia and which takes place between flashbacks which tell us the past of the hero who will have to face this abusive situation (very tonic and sober, unlike Hensworth, Miles Teller ) and some that another sequence of suspense and tension very well resolved. Unfortunately, sometimes the movie gets lost in its own twists and turns. forget to give us more poisonous details about the morality of drug companiesthe chains that the company places voluntarily or the new typologies of the code of the mad doctor.
There's a kind of missed opportunity in "Spiderhead," which aims to be an alternative to the mass of youth entertainment and sci-fi tropes that Netflix usually delivers, but which doesn't give in to the possibility of ceasing. to be attractive and commercial. Along the way, he leaves us with an interesting sequence of good ideas, great performances and an impeccable technical section (editing, sets, costumes). Considering the previous ones, not bad at all.
SOURCE: Reviews News
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