Ridley Scott unleashes androids in sci-fi series
Ridley Scott, when he is in his great-man-of-science-fiction mode, can be counted on to deliver a signature image.
In the new series “Raised by Wolves,” it’s a hovering android killing machine that splatters humans with her banshee scream. It’s this show’s version of the rainy neon cityscape in “Blade Runner” or the chest-exploding parasite in “Alien,” and though it’s not as startling as those, it makes you sit up and take notice.
“Raised by Wolves” premiered with three episodes Thursday on HBO Max. Scott is an executive producer and directed the first two episodes — and he has a proven affinity for androids. It’s not a bad bet that the green light went on in Scott’s head when he saw the potential of that lethal robot in the story created by Aaron Guzikowski.
Known as Mother, and brought to life by Danish actress Amanda Collin and a sizable digital-effects crew, she is pretty much the whole show through the six episodes of “Wolves” made available to critics. There are other things going on, including a religious war and, more prominently, an elaborate rumination on the meaning of parenting and family.
But they are more in the nature of data sets than drama; they feel as if they could have been assembled by the show’s intelligent androids. What catches your interest are the performances of Collin and Abubakar Salim (as Mother’s partner, Father) — well executed examples of the formality and otherworldliness that typify cinematic AI — and the moments when Collin’s pale skin transforms to bronze-colored armor and she rises into the air, arms outspread.
“Wolves” begins as Mother and Father crash on a distant, scrubby planet, having been sent across space with a set of frozen human embryos by atheist forces who are losing an all-out war against a religious group called the Mithraics.
As the androids set up camp and begin to raise their artificial family, the paradoxes are ready-made. Mother and Father, programmed to reject any notion of the supernatural and to instill atheism in their brood, are of course the new Adam and Eve, charged with rebooting the human race in their barren Eden. And as they are forced to take ever more drastic measures to protect the children, they react in ever more human ways, severely testing the idea that there is no such thing as a soul.
Their new home is no paradise — most of the children succumb to disease, leaving just one, Campion (Winta Mcgrath), which doesn’t bode well for humanity. So it’s both a danger and an opportunity when a ship carrying a thousand Mithraics arrives at the same planet.
If your appetite for portentous scifi action is robust, “Raised by Wolves” may go down easily enough. There is entertainment in watching Mother and Father learn parenting the hard way, but mostly there is just the wait for Mother to suit up and give us another adrenaline rush.