NETFLIX – ON DEMAND – MOVIE
After it was put online on June 17, the stay of Spiderhead at the top of the Netflix movie charts was rather brief. However, this feature film is directed by Top Gun. maverick, Joseph Kosinski, and for male star that of Thor. Love and Thunder, Chris Hemsworth. This failure, very relative (Spiderhead probably has more viewers than most theatrical releases), is probably due to its indefiniteness. Philosophical tale, dystopian nightmare and action film, this hybrid designed to please everyone manages to frustrate each of the audiences it is supposed to attract.
There is some injustice here. Building on Chris Hemsworth’s astonishing performance as a seductive and perverted man of power, Kosinski tries his hand at satire, putting tropes often used in science fiction stories to the service of more complex interrogations. than those that usually serve as an intellectual alibi for big Hollywood productions.
This intellectual ambition is due to the original material, Escape From Spiderhead, short story by the American George Saunders (published in France in 2013 in the collection December Ten, at Editions de l’Olivier). In this brief first-person account, the writer describes the torments of a common criminal who, in exchange for better prison conditions, agreed to experiment with various psychotropic drugs intended to control human urges.
Occult conspiracy
The story is brief, often funny (one of the drugs, Verbaluce, gives the subject faculties of expression worthy of a novelist published in the New Yorker), and of a deep blackness. Rather than maintaining this tone, the film’s script proceeds by adding external adjuvants: a love story, a criminal plot and a final fight.
The prisoner who discovers a conscience (Miles Teller), contrary to his literary model, is locked up for a crime (drunk driving with fatal consequences) that the staging presents as excusable. Lizzy (Jurnee Smollett), his companion in misery, isn’t a bad girl either. Yet Abnesti (Hemsworth), who seems to be both the caretaker and the head doctor of the establishment, is determined that the two young people inflict excruciating torment on each other – the protocol of the experiments is yet another variation on the one developed by Milgram on submission to authority, with, here, a pharmaceutical component.
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