Be it an Amazon Fire Stick, an Apple TV, or one of Roku’s various tiers of streaming boxes, there’s plenty of options for users on the market today. Built around the idea of watching media when it’s convenient for the viewer, not the network, streaming services are the go-to entertainment source for users around the world, and keeping a set-top box under your television makes it easy to access your favorite media whenever you want. While basic and cable television sees ever-shrinking numbers each year, companies like Netflix and Hulu have shot into the atmosphere. Ten years later, and the television landscape is more varied than ever. A decade ago, streaming boxes might have seemed pointless, a luxury for people looking to watch some basic web videos on their television instead of watching basic cable channels with their cable box.
For a great example of how collective activism can make electrifying entertainment, consult the brilliant Netflix series Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.In 2020, it’s more important than ever to have a good set-top box sitting underneath your television. But dusting off classic models and merging them with more politically conscientious ways of thinking doesn’t have to lead to boring or bland outcomes. In narrative terms, long-entrenched paradigms such as Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” continue to be highly influential. A great deal of not-so-good art is political too this film explicitly so. “All good art is political,” the author Toni Morrison famously noted.
Part of the problem here is that Larney takes the messages of his own movie very seriously, among other things warning us to heed the dangers of the climate crisis while simultaneously suggesting that one person and a bit of blind luck is our way out of it. If you’re thinking “don’t take a silly movie so seriously” – well, sure, but you can tell a lot about cultures by the kinds of narratives they embrace. The message here is similar to the kind presented in most superhero movies as well as in the marketing of real-world politicians (as explored in this excellent 2018 essay that explores the connection between caped crusaders and “the guiding myth of neoliberalism”). Photograph: Adelaide film festivalĢ067’s script trades in the messianic archetype, with its message that a “chosen one” will emerge to save humankind from catastrophe, while the rest of us follow like lemmings.
She informs the protagonist of a message relayed from the future, which simply reads “SEND ETHAN WHYTE.”ĭeborah Mailman plays the CTO of a company called Chronicorp. Wearing a silvery white wig and corporate futuristic attire, she sounds bizarrely robotic, as if reading from an instruction manual. Larney’s innovations are technical it’s hard to envision anybody congratulating him for a script riddled with hackneyed turns of phrase such as, “Do you really believe I’m going to save the world?” and, “You may be humanity’s only chance.” That last line is delivered to Ethan by the great Deborah Mailman, playing the chief technology officer of a company called Chronicorp.
Cheap but effective sci-fi films of this ilk include two from 2018: the US film Prospect and the writer/director Leigh Whannell’s outstanding Upgrade (made for about $5m).
It’s a different situation if their aesthetic aspiration is balanced with a good script, particularly one that takes the kinds of risks studio movies avoid. Indie film-makers who primarily seek to impress along these lines enter a situation in which the odds are stacked against them – they’re bringing a knife to a gunfight.
The problem is that Hollywood studios will always be able to make movies that are bigger, more spectacular and more stuffed with SFX. I’m dubious of this “big look on small change” genre in general. A message from the future requests that Ethan be shot forward in time using what looks like a preposterously large industrial fan.