What to watch
Aclimate crisis, confinement and a deep economic divide between the haves and the have-nots. Netflix’s new sci-fi series Snowpiercer couldn’t feel more timely. Based on this year’s Academy Award-winning director Bong Joon Ho’s 2013 English language movie of the same name, itself inspired by 1982 French graphic novel Le Transperceneige, it posits a near future where the planet has become virtually uninhabitable.
As a horrifyingly beautiful animated opening informs us, weather changes were followed by war, which made the Earth even hotter.
Then, when men of science tried to cool the Earth, they only succeeded in freezing it to the core. As temperatures plummeted to sub -100 degrees Celsius, the solution to save humanity was one of biblical proportions.
Essentially a great ark, the 1001-car long Snowcatcher will keep those onboard safe and alive by perpetually traversing the globe.
However, with its inhabitants including everyone from those who paid top dollar for the privilege to others who ‘‘boarded the train like rats’’, it’s not just the vehicle conducting revolutions.
We join the action six years in, with the ‘‘tailies’’ being seemingly starved to extinction.
Rations are constantly being reduced and the train’s security has brutally repressed any attempts by them to rise above their station and squalid conditions. With no children born to them in five years and their population getting older and sicker, many of them are starting to lose hope of changing their lot.
Andre Layton (Daveed Diggs) isn’t one of those, but his plans are turned upside down when the train’s management escort him to another carriage. A body has been discovered in third-class and the authorities are willing to offer him a new status in exchange for the use of the former homicide detective’s special set of skills.
Doors will open wherever his investigations lead, passenger relations manager Melanie Cavill (Jennifer Connelly) coos.
However, Layton isn’t so sure he wants to turn his back on his fellow tailies.
Like its cinematic predecessor, whose release was blighted by a battle between director Bong and Harvey Weinstein over its final cut, this Snowpiercer has had a somewhat tumultuous journey. What we’re now seeing is the second pilot, this sophomore effort shepherded to the screen by Orphan Black’s Graeme Manson and The Sarah Connor Chronicles’ Josh Friedman.
The result is something that feels slightly disappointingly safe. Sure, it has the slick production values and sensibilities of Westworld and A Handmaid’s Tale but, at its heart, it feels like a police procedural or old-school, episodic sci-fi, a la Battlestar Galactica or Falling Skies.
Not that there’s anything wrong with shows like those two, in fact they are worth aspiring to, but it just feels a letdown given the potential.
Armando Iannucci may also have to share some of the blame. It is hard to take Snowpiercer’s onboard machinations seriously in light of his similarly themed comedy Avenue 5.
Still, this definitely has plenty of positives and likely an army of fans, heavily influenced by a terrific performance by Connelly (Labyrinth, A Beautiful Mind). She is fabulous as the manipulative Cavill, a woman whose demeanour is seemingly as icy as the weather outside.
Elsewhere, TVNZ OnDemand is hosting another small screen spin-off of a movie whose fortunes were ‘‘Weinsteined’’.
Preceding 2006’s Casino Royale’s reinvention of 007 by mere months, Alex Rider: Stormbreaker was billed as James Bond Jnr for the Millennial generation. However, despite a starry cast (Ewan McGregor, Bill Nighy, Alicia Silverstone, Mickey Rourke and, um, Jimmy Carr), and a budget that made it the most expensive independent British movie ever, the film tanked, allegedly because Weinstein decided not to release it widely in the US (although it didn’t exactly receive stellar reviews either).
Now, 14 years later, Anthony Horowitz’s young spy gets another chance to shine in this series from Guy Burt, the creator of The Bletchley Circle and The Borgias.
Alex (The White Queen’s Otto Farrant) is a young man whose life is thrown into chaos when his uncle’s untimely demise reveals that rather than working for a bank, he was actually employed by a specialist sub-division of the British government.
‘‘MI6 gather the information, we execute it,’’ boss Alan Blunt (Stephen Dillane) says.
Having been impressed by Alex’s resourcefulness in tracking them down, they’re keen to sign him up, and they won’t take no for an answer.
Like Snowpiercer, this offers solid but safe television. Cosily pitched somewhere between Doctor Who, The Blacklist and the countless Hollywood spy movies of the past decade, it feels somewhat leaden and lacking inspiration, when compared to the likes of Killing Eve or the Kingsman movies.