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Into this grave new world comes our hard-boiled hero Takeshi Kovacs, released from prison and dropped into a snazzy, buffed-up Joel Kinnaman-shaped sleeve after a couple of centuries on ice. But it’s far from a deathless utopia: rampant capitalism has ensured that only the wealthy can afford decent sleeves, with downtrodden proles being kept in storage for decades or transferred into the first available body, regardless of its suitability. Flattened by a lorry? No probs: the paramedics can pop out your stack and – provided it hasn’t been smashed – put it in safe storage until a new body (or “sleeve” in the show’s vernacular) is available. That’s because (due to some alien tech discovered off-world) everybody can have their consciousness digitally backed up in a “stack”, a disc-shaped computer stored where the skull meets the spine. This glossy, gory cyber-noir takes us 300-odd years into the future, where Earth has become an overpopulated, dirty, decadent, neon-lit Bladerunner-esque mess – but outright death is a rarity. It’s Star Trek, Jim, but not as we know it. She’s superb – certainly the most charismatic actor to wear the uniform since Patrick Stewart – and many of the classic Trekkie touchstones are there too: the Spock/Data-esque analytical crewmember, the just-go-with-it pseudo-science, and old favourite alien races the Klingons and Vulcans.īut despite the plethora of nods to the past, the refreshed format gives the show space to develop without the pressures of time.
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Set a decade before the original team of Kirk, Spock et al set out on the Enterprise, it stars The Walking Dead‘s Sonequa Martin-Green as a mercurial Starfleet officer with a dark history. The most intriguing concept for a Star Trek offshoot in, like, forever, Discovery plunges the viewer directly into an all-out war, ditching the series’ classic episodic format along the way.Īs befits a show being released on Netflix, what you get here is instead a single story played out in full. When Natalie Portman’s biologist finds herself personally drawn into the mystery, she joins a team venturing into the Shimmer and slowly uncovers the shocking truth. Everything and everybody they send inside disappears, never to return – with one exception. When an unexplained “shimmer” engulfs a tract of land in the southeastern United States, then starts growing, authorities are confused and powerless to stop it. This is one of the most accomplished and interesting science fiction movies of recent years – a visually and sonically outstanding film that’ll leave you with more questions than answers, but enough clues to work everything out too. Why? Because they likely figured it’d flop in cinemas, being chilly, complex and brainy right or wrong, big studios don’t credit the average filmgoer with much intellectual curiosity.ĭon’t let Paramount’s disappointing decision deter you from watching it, though. Originally slated for release in cinemas worldwide, in the end its studio Paramount granted it only a limited US theatrical release, with the rest of the world getting their first chance to see it on Netflix. Writer-director Alex Garland’s follow-up to the dazzling Ex Machina had a tricky inception. Watch Black Mirror: Bandersnatch on Netflix If you’ve played Telltale’s The Walking Dead or similar adventure games, you’ll see clear echoes here, but Brooker and Netflix have still pulled off something noteworthy, even if the story itself is, understandably, not quite as laser-focussed as we’ve come to expect of a Black Mirror episode. And, this being Black Mirror, many of them are incredibly bleak. It’s not often a brand new entertainment format arrives on Netflix (or anywhere, for that matter), but Charlie Brooker’s experimental feature-length episode of Black Mirror is just that: melding the worlds of movies and video games, it’s an interactive film in which the viewer plays an active role.Īt certain points in the narrative – which stars Dunkirk‘s Fionn Whitehead as a young programmer designing a choose-your-own-adventure computer game in the 1980s (yes, it’s all very meta) – you’re able to pick one of two paths, steering the story towards one of ten distinct endings.