![]() ![]() Humans under the age of ten murder people in cold blood, and pretty much give themselves a haircut and motor on. When ruthless, on-a-mission Jessica learns from the comic book that her father is “probably” dead already, she shuts herself into the cabinet under the kitchen sink and screams, in total defiance of her own character arc. But it’s a comic-book-dystopia world, so “believable” is what it is. ![]() His placid-faced mantra, “What have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world?” combines strains of Los Angeloid toxic positivity with the creepy puppetmaster sociopath vibe of the Rajneesh cultists who famously poisoned Oregon salad bars in the 1980s.Īll the characters are epically weird, often but certainly not always in ways that are believable. The sociopathic death-cult rich-folk vein Cusack is mining harkens back to… well, gosh, the entire rich history of evil-dudes-in-suits cinema. (“Mashup” might ultimately be the appropriate characterization.) Jessica Hyde (Sasha Lane), the comic book protagonist who turns out to be be a real and intermittently murderous girl, is an unapologetic reboot of Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor in the Terminator movies. Stuff that you’d call “homage” or “derivative” depending which side of the bed you woke up on. There’s a lot of stuff going on with this show. They discover they are more right than any of them imagined. The premise? A cabal of geeks come together around a cult comic book they believe contains clues to various viral plagues that are being engineered and released onto the unsuspecting public. Utopia, adapted by Gillian Flynn ( Gone Girl, Sharp Objects) and featuring a pretty bone-chilling performance by John Cusack as an evil biotech millionaire, doesn’t “touch a nerve” so much as reach out and grab the nerve, yank on it, stretch it tight and pluck it repeatedly like a whiskey-swilling banjo virtuoso and then tie it in a complicated sailor knot for you. But, like, so will your actual life right now, if you live in a populated area or have access to news. Like: if you want to feel desperately uncomfortable for several hours, this show will get you there. After seven months of lockdown, privation and doomscrolling brought to you by a creepy virus and the complete annihilation of the public trust, I am not entirely sure why anyone needs this show. Tea-spill alert: if there is such a thing as “too timely,” Amazon’s Utopia is arguably in the zone. ![]()
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