![]() The cast, however, bring their own touches to the table the more the show unfolds, and it’s here that the new Utopia does manage to stand up in its own right. But the US TV-ness of it all can’t help but make the warped humour and eccentric flourishes feel slightly sanitised compared to the Channel 4 programme’s eye-catchingly unique production design, this looks and feels like most other expensive US dramas out there. Flynn has a neat ear for dialogue, and a taste for exposing the nastiness beneath the wholesome surface of society, which really comes to the fore as she reworks details of the narrative – one moment involving a fake social media profile and a narrative to sell to the public is bleakly plausible. None evil.” That’s the moral dilemma at the heart of the show, as we follow our rag-tag ensemble trying to navigate their way through a situation in which nobody seems to be on the right side. ![]() “How much evil do you have to do in the world to do good?” “None. But that unsettling eeriness gives Flynn’s fast-paced drama an edge that it might not have had a year ago – if it doesn’t feel directly relevant to world events, it certainly feels indirectly adjacent to them, fusing the apocalyptic mood with the natural human tendency to wonder how much natural disasters such as forest fires and global warming are down to our own treatment of the planet when the human race is so gargantuan in number, humankind’s irresponsible, selfish streak can carry a huge impact. If the word “timely” springs to mind, that’s because, in many ways, it is there’s an innate terror to seeing a flu spread through the human population in a fictional scenario, even if there’s a conspiracy theory at play that is notably far from the real life situation of the coronavirus pandemic. And so we fall in with a gaggle of young misfits, who are all united by the quest of solve the mystery of the titular comic book – a graphic novel that seems to be able to predict viruses and other nasty things before they erupt around the world. Once in the lap of David Fincher, it’s Gillian Flynn who steers this reimagining of the show to Amazon Prime Video, and she treads a careful line between staying faithful to the original and trying to do something new with the same material. It was cruel to see that vision cut short after just two seasons – and it’s almost equally cruel to watch America come along and attempt to recreate its sinister magic. ![]() Bold, colourful, dark and rivetingly disturbing, Dennis Kelly’s tale of a comic book that held the secret to global disasters was one of the most striking, original series ever put on our TV screens. “What did you do today to earn your place in this crowded world?” That’s the question asked repeatedly in Utopia, the US remake of the Channel 4 thriller from 2013. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |