An intimate sci-fi experience on Amazon is as erratic as it is intriguing

Is the list of outstanding performers enough to make a series? In the end this is the question that leaves him floating in the air “alone”, A bizarre seven-part Amazon Prime video experience planned during lockdown And this persistently attacks issues we’ve thought about a lot in the past year or so (not necessarily from a science fiction perspective).

This is: solitude, family, loneliness. Solos want to talk about all this and use science fiction as an excuse to stir up emotions Very human. Sometimes she does so in terms that bring her closer to ‘Black Mirror’ (Anthony Mackie’s episode Facing a Replica of Himself seems like the narrative opposite of the one in which the woman received a replica of her deceased husband) but in general, ‘solos’ have their own style. .

Solos play with the premise that all the interpreters—except for the last chapter, where Dan Stevens and Morgan Freeman are found—will be alone, and will talk about what led them to this situation. Sometimes they talk to the camera, like Constance Wu, and sometimes to artificial intelligence, like Helen Mirren or Uzo Aduba. Only in the last mentioned episode or in Nicole Behari – who is the most traditional in narration and most ambiguous in meaning – There is interaction with others.

In the same way, sometimes science fiction is a staple, like Anne Hathaway’s time travel or Beharie’s son’s exponential growth, and other times it’s commonplace in the background, like Constance Wu’s recent Twilight Zone misrepresentation or fear of the aftermath of a pandemic already passed Aduba, the chapter no doubt resonates today, although it does occur in the distant future. The element of gender lies between cosmetic and useful, but the truth is that it is never seen as superficial.Caught by hair.

Human science fiction, the last frontier

But here what David Weil is talking about is feelings and humanity. little bit What did he do in “Hunters”?, which was sold in principle as something of this sort, roughly mill, as is the story of the Nazi hunting team today, and it ended up being a drama about people with too many traumas to tell. Here the same thing and That’s what gives the series its character, but perhaps also what makes more than one scenes break up.

Because You have to go through a fair amount of flattery, tantrums, tantrums, tantrums, and hermeneutics in general.: There is not a single “light” episode among the seven. They all speak of loneliness, yes, but of painful loneliness, complete isolation, terminal illness, and memories as the last bastion of what makes us human. The series is full of existential drama, and it uses all the resources of the genre (machines that steal memories, time travel to cure diseases, epidemics that rob us of humanity) to emphasize it.

The global arithmetic, how could it be otherwise, is irregular: There are no horrific or great episodes, but they all have a time when their intensity is underestimated. “Solos” are clearly about the cast, but the series seems to take so much pride in them that it’s constantly remembered, facilitating their sparkling moments. And it almost always works, because there’s no bad compiler, but they don’t always come naturally.

At the end, in “solos” Details count: the sci-fi elements that make Bihari’s episode special and spooky; The sobriety of Helen Mirren’s composition, which gives a lesson to the rest as to how in this case, less is more; very slight interconnection between the rings, which enriches them; The parody on the conclusion of the Wu episode; The humor injected by Hathaway, laughing a little at his picture… In the end, it’s possible that someone would do a sci-fi work distancing themselves from the more noisy side of the genre even though the outcome wasn’t perfect.