Cyberpancrealism – Weekend – Kommersant
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Peripherals, the Westworld adaptation of William Gibson’s novel of the same name, is coming to Amazon Prime Video.
The longer cyberpunk, invented by William Gibson and his co-author Bruce Sterling, has been around in the 1980s, the more obvious it should be classified not as science fiction, but as realism itself. Reality in some areas has long caught up with fiction – that’s the plot of “Devices” is built on minimal assumptions. In 2032, somewhere in the American outback, the Fisher family lives: a blind mother (Melinda Page Hamilton), her veteran son Burton (Jack Reynor) and daughter Flynn (Chloe Grace Moretz) – a girl with no specific occupations, but with a talent to pass the most difficult levels in video games. In the recent past, the world has gone through an apocalyptic period (here it is called the “Jackpot”), and poverty and hopelessness reign everywhere: drugs cost a fortune, but drugs can be bought around every corner. Burton is in pain from electronic devices implanted in his body – in the war, these cyber-implants allowed the Marines to tune in to the same wave and coordinate actions. Flynn even suspects that his brother is stealing painkillers from his mother. To earn money for medicine, the guy tests video games in a shabby trailer next to his house. One day, he receives a lucrative job and begs Flynn to put on a high-tech headset that came in the mail and play in his avatar instead. So Flynn finds himself in the amazing London of the future (the game takes place in 2099), filled with skyscrapers in the form of antique statues, chic and rich, but for some reason rather deserted.
By order of the manager of the game, Flynn, in the guise of a brother, kidnaps some woman at a social event, but then the game scenario takes a hard turn: the kidnapped eye is cut out, Flynn implants it, and she penetrates into a well-guarded bunker, allowing the input device to scan someone else’s retina. It’s not that Flynn has never experienced violence in video games, but here for the first time she physically feels pain and understands that all this is not a simulation, but also a reality, just another, where her consciousness controls the body of the robot – the so-called “peripheral device”. And who is playing who here is unclear – it seems that this is the impoverished world of Flynn and she herself is a toy for the rich inhabitants of London from the future. The Variety reviewer here could not resist a caustic remark: excuse me, but this is exactly the plot that underlay “Westworld”! And now its creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy seem to have decided to no longer hide their sources and have taken on a similar story for their idol Gibson. Moreover, they took the director Vincenzo Natali, who shot a couple of episodes of “The World”.
Meanwhile, director Natalie does a delicate job in the new series: in the initial episodes he directed, there is not the slightest hint that the life of Burton and Flynn in 2032 is not real. No, this is the basic reality: here is a rusty trailer, here is a friend of Burton who returned from the war, a one-armed and legless cripple, a long-legged village girl Flynn in short shorts, a crowded bar and with him a dark wasteland where they buy dope. Far from immediately you notice that all this looks somehow too cinematic. Moretz looks too cool for a poor goner – hell, she has perfect makeup on her face! And the one-armed electric chair cripple (Eli Gorey) is too easy to butcher in the wasteland with dangerous drug dealers. And the local mafia drug dealer (Louis Hertham) is kind of painfully cute. And even a sick mother has a moderately blooming look. Some kind of overly elegant post-apocalypse you have – where are the swollen faces and ingrained dirt? And then a doubt rolls in: is the director hacking, hanging noodles on our ears, or mocking Hollywood standards that are far from reality? Or hints, according to the script, that “not a dream is a dream, but a dream is not a dream”? After all, the Nolans always do this (the creator of the series, Jonathan Nolan, is the brother of director Christopher Nolan, who wrote scripts for all his films). And here there is a feeling of some kind of sticky paranoia, when it is not entirely clear where the reality is and who is pulling the strings. It is only clear that London in 2099 is rather deserted, because only the rich survived – who would doubt it.
But at least there is one constant here that you can definitely rely on: the London-based Russian oligarch and patron of the arts Lev Zubov (JJ Field) is most definitely a villain who hired a certain Wilf Netherton (Gary Carr) to spy on Flynn. , an intellectual entangled in spy games with past and future. And a powerful organization of murderers operating in different realities, like in Gibson’s novel, published in 2014, is called Matryoschka – there can be any number of realities, but in one of them we will certainly meet bad Russians.
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