Utopia review: a nasty case of reel imitating real
Utopia could perhaps be seen as pertinent to the present time, but it could even be seemed to be adding to the anxiety and stress.
Utopia is out there on Amazon Prime Video.
Utopia cast: John Cusack, Rainn Wilson, Sasha Lane, Dan Byrd and Javon Walton
Utopia creator: Gillian Flynn
Utopia rating: Two stars
A contagious virus with no vaccine, and large pharma scrambling to form millions. No these aren’t headlines from a newspaper. These are the plot arcs from Amazon Prime Video’s latest big-ticket offering Utopia. It all starts rather innocuously, as things usually do, in an old house in suburban Chicago where a lone original copy of Utopia — a comic book book — surfaces. the looks of Utopia, a sequel to Dystopia, sends the magazine universe into a tizzy, attracting bidders from everywhere . Enter a gaggle of ragtag young adults who geek out over the magazine . they need never met in real world , but have formed a friendship supported online discussions and dissections of the said magazine . Plans are hatched to get their hands on Utopia because it’s the keys to events that are unfolding around them. The group shares a rather unhealthy obsession of conspiracy theories, but they’re not the sole ones coveting the magazine . Surely, the protagonist of the magazine herself, Jessica Hyde (Sasha Lane) too wants a bit of the action. Then there are the trigger-happy bad guys who won’t stop at anything to urge the magazine in their possession. While the group plays hide and seek with the bad guys, aided by Hyde, a deadly virus has unleashed itself round the US and other people are dying in hordes. We meet John Cusack (Kevin Christie) who heads an enormous pharma company, then there’s Michael Stearns (Rainn Wilson), a virologist, who meanders his way into the center of it all.
The timing of the show couldn’t are worse, or best, counting on your interests within the ‘pandemic genre’. The ‘spread of a deadly virus’ has been par for the course in many TV shows, starting from police-procedurals to medical dramas. House MD, the great Doctor and even the recent season of The Resident had plots constructed around it. We are conversant in how that pans out, but to possess an equivalent theme cover eight long episodes are often trying. Utopia hits too on the brink of home, and therefore the CDC workers clad in yellow hazmat suit are too like the blue PPE kits that medical personnel are wearing round the world as they fight Covid-19.
Do we actually need to spend hours seeing what we are handling everyday around us? The scene involving helpless parents, who are protesting outside a faculty where their children are quarantined, may be a reflection of what we are undergoing as a society globally. We can’t even gather peacefully or in protest in real world , it are often lethal.
Utopia could perhaps be seen as pertinent to the present time, but it could even be seemed to be adding to the anxiety and stress. Helmed by Gillian Flynn, Utopia may be a remake of a 2013 British show. the first had received its shares of criticism for being too violent and dark. The American version apparently has diluted the violence quotient, but it’s still gory. a specific scene which involves an eye fixed and a spoon will make even the foremost sturdy of show watchers squeamish. But watching Flynn’s screenwriting oeuvre, she has no issues with violence. Even in something like Gone Girl, she didn’t recoil from blood and gore: Remember the scene with Rosamund Pike and Neil Patrick Harris? the matter with Utopia is it takes too long to return to the purpose . We run circles: into plots and subplots and backstories. Many long scenes are utilized in trying to decode the magazine with help coming back from strange quarters. It doesn’t have the pace of a thriller, nor the gravitas of a ‘pandemic-drama’. The violence detracts from the most plot, which oscillates between the ‘geeks shall save the planet from imminent annihilation’ tangent and ‘man is that the root explanation for all evil’. Maybe at another time, the show would have made cinematic sense, and that we would have marvelled at this alternate world. But this is often a nasty case of reel imitating real. you’re safer watching reruns of your favourite sitcoms instead.
