Been there, done that
Ridley Scott’s Raised by Wolves has nothing new to say
LOS ANGELES — Creating a post-apocalyptic story that feels genuinely new has become a near-impossible task. Even if the real world didn’t feel like it was blurring the line between fact and fiction every day, the “what happens to the world when the world’s already ended?” scenario has been done to death and back.
At some point, the easiest way forward in telling such a story is to go back to what’s worked before. But as HBO Max’s sci-fi drama Raised by Wolves proves, drawing from a once successful well isn’t necessarily a winning formula, either — not even when you get a master of the genre like Ridley Scott to steer it.
From its very first minutes, watching Raised By Wolves feels like watching writer Aaron Guzikowski play a game of hard sci-fi bingo. The opening minutes follow the trajectory of a pod ship landing in a barren desert on the extrasolar planet Keplar-22b, where a pair of androids in ill-fitting silver bodysuits emerge and quickly get to work establishing their own colony. They call each other Mother (Amanda Collin) and Father (Abubakar Salim) because their human masters programmed them to nurture a sextet of children into a thriving civilization.
Soon enough, Mother is lying on the ground in their new home as Father methodically inserts a series of needles into her waiting abdomen so that she can nourish the fetuses into life — and lo, they are now Keplar-22b’s very own Adam and Eve.
But the planet is punishingly inhospitable, and their lives are bleak; 12 years later, only one child, Campion (Winta McGrath), has survived.
Between the sparse production design, throwback costumes and Guzikowski’s fidelity to the tropes that have defined science fiction for decades, Raised by Wolves very deliberately evokes the works that inspired it. And in directing the first two episodes, Scott establishes a specific visual language that will be familiar to any fan of seminal work like Alien and Blade Runner, though the grim colours and drab setting of this series gives him little to work with in terms of variation.
Perhaps most damning is the how basic the characters themselves are. Only Mother and Father make notable impressions, thanks to deft portrayals from Collin and Salim.
This holds especially true for the female characters, of which there are few of any real consequence, and the most substantial by a mile is Mother, an android built to breed who has a furious breakdown when the planet’s harsh condition make her unable to fulfil her purpose.
As with most aspects of Raised by Wolves, these characters are too derivative to compel, and extraordinarily frustrating from a show that purports itself a true novelty. A show that can’t find more uses for women than wife and mother isn’t one that’s thinking even halfway outside the box, let alone light-years beyond our earthly orbit.