From the bunker to the stars – Weekend
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The Shelter series, a post-apocalyptic story about generations living in an underground bunker after a disaster and not remembering another life, is being released on the Apple TV + online cinema.
“We don’t know why we’re in the Shelter, who built it, or why the world outside is dangerous. We do not know when it will be possible to leave the Shelter, we only know that this day has not yet come. This mantra has been repeated for three generations by the survivors of the disaster and inhabiting the underground bunker 144 floors deep. What kind of apocalypse made people bury themselves in the ground is unknown: 140 years ago there was a rebellion, and the rebels managed to destroy all evidence of the past before the authorities destroyed them.
Social life in the Shelter is simple: the lower caste lives on the lower levels, maintains the generator and garbage compartments. The bunker is run by an elite from the upper floors – the power of the law and the engineering department, headed by the arrogant man Holland (Tim Robbins). The mid-rise middle class has a mayor, a fine, white-haired woman who has been re-elected for forty years in a row as the epitome of stability, and a sheriff, the energetic Holston (David Oyelow). But that’s not all – the lawyers have their own guard, led by the gloomy Sims in a Chekist leather jacket (rapper Common), whose sinister face does not promise concessions to the scum. The Guard controls reproduction, allowing some couples to have children every few years, and makes sure that people do not own “relics” – things from a past life like old toys, books and pieces of iron, the purpose of which the current ones may not know. The most terrible punishment in the bunker is expulsion outside, to the depopulated dead land, which the inhabitants see through the eternally dirty window lenses: even in a spacesuit you can’t live there for more than a couple of minutes.
And it must happen that the wife of the sheriff Allison (Rashida Jones), who could not get pregnant in the year allotted for this, suddenly realizes that there is a deception all around: the lawyers lie that they returned her childbearing function, which means they lie about the rest. Believing that the scorched earth outside the windows is a carefully induced hallucination, but in fact everything blooms and smells there, Allison decides to leave the bunker – and dies in front of everyone. A year later, the inconsolable Sheriff Holston, investigating the death of an overly curious IT specialist who hid an old computer disk, realizes that there really can be a flowering garden outside, and also goes to his own death. Only after this long prologue in the series does the main character, the energetic mechanic girl Jules (Rebecca Ferguson), seize the initiative: she loved the IT specialist, investigated his death together with the sheriff, Holston appointed her the new sheriff, and now it is she who will unravel all the secrets of the bunker for us.
The series is based on the Bunker series of novels by Hugh Howie, where a mixture of genres reigns: here is a detective with investigations of mysterious murders, here is a western in the entourage of steampunk, where the problems of the sheriff of the lawmen do not care, here is a totalitarian dystopia, where The Matrix meets Snowpiercer: while we are here fighting for survival in conditions of scarce resources, the elites are lying to us. The story about the bunker is based on a thick metaphor: there are no elevators (read: social ones too), so the bottom can’t move, and the top doesn’t want to. The plot throws the viewer more and more new mysteries: is it really possible to survive outside the bunker? who kills those who try to find out the truth? This is a pamphlet about the fact that the queen of the fields is information: whoever collects, manages and distributes it, that is the power (here they are technocrats represented by the head of the IT department Holland). The impetus for changing the fate of the lower classes is, again, mastering the “truth” about how the world works outside the bunker – there is no hope for the middle class.
All these issues are well known to viewers of the Soviet film Through Thorns to the Stars (1980), where the evil dwarf Turanchoks hid the true ecological situation on the planet Dessa from the inhabitants of underground caves in order to sell them gas masks, water and synthetic food and profit from their diseases. But in the series, which, based on the novels of Howie, was created by showrunner Graham Yost (screenwriter of the legendary film “Speed” and producer of TV series “Justice”“Americans”, “Sneaky Pete” And “Slow Horses”), this critique of the capitalist doctrine barely hatches. Yost is more interested in creating the appearance of democracy inside the bunker: give people a mayor and a sheriff, and they will think that they live in a normal society, not knowing who really rules here. The plot is based on the assumption of what will happen when the executive branch interferes with the legislative one – this is the subject of a satirical episode where the newly-minted sheriff Jules legally arrests the head of the local punishers Sims, but the law does not triumph for long. The only way out for the sheriff is to kill the state in himself and end up outside the bunker. But what she finds there will be shown in the last frames of the final series, and, apparently, this will be the beginning of the next season: judging by the popularity of the series, the story about the lawless sheriff can become as long-playing as The Walking Dead.
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