The Peripheral 1.1-1.2: Cyberpunk, Time Travel, and Alternate Reality

Just saw the first two episodes of The Peripheral on Amazon Prime Video.  It's an adaptation of the 2014 novel of the same name by William Gibson, the veritable godfather of cyberpunk, and made by the creators of Westworld on HBO, so it has to be good, right?

Well, it is.  Pretty good, that is.   I haven't read the book, so I'm not making comparisons.  My favorite parts are 2099 London, inside the peripheral, a cyber construct that our heroes and villains from an earlier time -- just ten years from now, and who knows when else -- inhabit.  But there's some triteness here.  Good old Southern boys.  The mother of the hero (or one of the heroes), Flynne (well played by Chloë Grace Moretz) dependent on some drug to treat her deadly cancer.  I also could have lived without such physical detail of the eye-transplant in the first episode.

But there are also lots of fun and cool details, like the deputy or whoever he was coming upon what seems to be a coffee-to-go just floating in the air, in the second episode.  And Flynne does bring back a drug from the future to cure her mother, after seeing an obituary for her, who would otherwise have died very soon.  We also soon learn that Flynne's entering the peripheral causes her visceral self to branch off in a different life back in 2030.  So we're dealing here not just with cyberpunk, but with time travel, in effect, and alternate realities, which is tremendously ok in my book.

In addition to drugs and knowledge, money can also be transferred from 2100 to 2030, or seventy years back in time, from the cyberworld to the real world -- if you can call a world already significantly different from ours in 2022 really real -- and that opens all kinds of possibilities, such as people in the further future hiring assassins in the nearer future.  And at this point, that's what we have in The Peripheral, all kinds of intriguing possibilities.  Good guys and bad guys, young and older people, of all genders, and lots of people and things in between.  I'd say as long as The Peripheral continues to mine the esoteric, mind-bending possibilities of cyberspace, time travel, and alternate realities, it could be a top-notch series.

I'll be watching and reviewing.

alternate reality about The Beatles on Amazon, and  FREE on Vocal

 

The Fifth Wave: Pretty Good, Actually

Just saw The Fifth Wave on Starz.  The film received a fistful of negative reviews - see the summary on The Fifth Wave's Wikipedia entry - but I find critics to often be pretentious ignoramuses anyway, and guess what, I liked the movie.

Which is not to say it's great - far from it - but it has a lot to like.  Apropos Starz, it has a lot of impressive star power, with Liev Schreiber (Ray Donavon), Maggie Siff (Sons of Anarchy), and Maria Bello (kitchen sink) in very well-played supporting roles.  And as to the leads, Chloë Grace Moretz, Nick Robinson, and Ron Livingston are more than good enough to carry the story.

And what is the story?  Well, alien invasions are as cliched as they come, but this one manages to break some new ground, in the five-stage (five waves) strategy they apply to rid the Earth of us, the human inhabitants.   The key is explained about two-thirds through the movie: you bomb a house for insects, but some always survive, so you have to devise more innovative, hand-to-bug methods to get the very last ones.   It's a strong idea, straight from the 2013 novel of the same name by Rick Yancey.

Since I haven't read the novel, I don't know if the one part that bothered me is due to the book or the movie adaption.  It was a ham-handed love conquers all theme, wherein an alien guy falls in love with the heroine Cassie, and turns on his own kind to help her and humanity.   Not that I object to love as a motivator.   But laying it all out in a five minute narration was not very convincing, and only made it because Chloë Grace Moretz as Cassie is so innocently appealing.

But when the movie was over, I found myself wanting more of the story, which means with all its flaws, The Fifth Wave did a lot right.   Let's hope there's a sequel.  And, critics, should you see it, get your heads out of your backsides and learn to relax and enjoy a movie.