I’m a believer: Mars! #NationalGeographic #Mars #Netflix #sciencefiction #ElonMusk #SpaceX #

Wow. What a tv series Mars is! So inspiring… and believable. National Geographic have mixed talking heads of the Earth’s top scientists (recorded to 2016) with a great near-future science fiction show in which humans colonise Mars for the first time (2033). The show is entirely grounded, entirely science based and actually happening in the now. There are significant cameos with Elon Musk himself and real footage of the SpaceX program. There are interviews with Neil deGrasse Tyson (US astrophysicist) and Andy Weir (author of the amazing The Martian novel… you know, the Matt Damon film was made from it). But better than that… we have a docudrama of their vision being played out before us. It’s compelling and terrifying drama, as humans living on the edge problem solve because their very lives depend upon it. There’s a definite feel of The Martian‘s narrative here, which is no bad thing, given how much research Mr Weir did to write his novel. What an amazing story of human endeavour and spirit… it’s kind of humbling… also because it helps you realise just how vulnerable a species we are. If you’ve ever liked any sort of sci-fi in your entire life, then you simply must watch this show (two series available) on Netflix. It scores 10 out of 10 from me.

Fans of John Wick will like Polar! #JohnWick #Polar #DarkHorseComics #MadsMikkelsen #Netflix #MattLucas

Mads Mikkelsen plays the assassin-with-a-heart Duncan Vizla in this neo-noir movie version of the Dark Horse comic book. Vizla is finally calling it a day and is about to collect his pension pot of $24m… except his unscrupulous employers (played by the wonderfully hammy Matt Lucas) can’t afford for him to collect. Naughty Matt therefore decides to have Vizla bumped off… to which Vizla takes extreme exception! Fancy taking it so personally!

Mikkelsen does a great job, bringing brooding menace, regret for misdeeds and a deep sadness to Vizla in equal measures. His relationship with the damaged young woman living in the chalet-next-door is particularly tender and believable. And believability/credibility is an entirely essential requirement for this movie, given how the rest of it is so cartoonish (unsurprising in a comic book conversion), anarchic, darkly comedic, full of caricature and bullet-raddled. Indeed, were it not for Mikkelsen, the movie would be far too voyeuristic and immoral for the taste of pretty much all audiences.

The body-count is of course ludicrously high, and Vizla has an all but superhuman ability to survive torture, brutality and heavy ordinance. It’s escapist fare, just like the John Wick movies. And there’s going to be a second movie in the series, according to industry insiders! Hopefully, the tonal balance of the next instalment will be better judged. But Polar is a good popcorn movie if you like this sort of thing. Happy days.

Stylish new scifi show: Ad Vitam #Netflix #sciencefiction #AdVitam

Humankind now regenerates – using stem-cells to renew and refresh the body – to the extent no one dies anymore. The oldest human on the planet is 169 and she looks no more than 30yrsold! Of course, if no one dies anymore, population control becomes a serious problem. Truly young people just can’t get space to live in. They are disenfranchised by those older than them… and then the waves of suicide begin: hopeless young people, guilty old people, the religious, and so on.

Our protagonist is a grizzled cop (he doesn’t regenerate enough because it gives him headaches) aged 119yrsold. He’s been a copy for 100 years – ennui and disillusionment don’t even begin to cover it. When 7 young people turn up dead on a beach, he’s tasked with uncovering a particularly sinister suicidal cult known as Saul. He uses a cult survivor to try and get inside the group based at The Church of Glorification – and outfit that is anti-regeneration and believes in natural ageing and death.

Ad Vitam is actually a French series with subtitles, but you the show is so immersive that you won’t even notice the subtitles. It’s compelling, fascinating in an awful way, and disturbingly credible. Because of that – there are content warnings on the show. I love the show – the ideas are well articulated, philosophically coherent, and entirely accessible. Being French, the whole thing is stylish, ubercool and… sexy in a typically Gallic way.

A couple of nice points. Living so long, people get very bored of their jobs and ‘retrain’ every ten years or so… but not our cop friend. Living so long and always being young, people can have kids no matter their age… but having kids is kinda selfish… and society is about to vote to have a ban on having children!!! What sort of world would it be if we were all immortal but there were no kids? People don’t really understand what death means in an everyday way anymore. So, our cop has to explain to a mother that her daughter has committed suicide, but the mother simply can’t comprehend what it means.

If you like intelligent, moving scifi, then Ad Vitam is for you. It gets 8.5 out of 10 from me. You can find it on Netflix. And it’s FAR BETTER THAN BRAD PITT’S TERRIBLE MOVIE Ad Astra. Go Ad Vitam!

Enough food for thought to make you obese! #TheGreatHack #TheGreatHackNetflix

Your personality and behaviours can be mapped and predicted with just 5000 data points. More than that, the way in which to influence you and change your behaviour (such as who you vote for) can be calculated and implemented (via platforms such as Facebook). None of this is particularly farfetched – human beings are far less sophisticated than our egos like to think. Yet, to watch it being carried out is hugely disturbing and unsettling. It makes you doubt if democracy actually operates anywhere in the world anymore. We like to think it does, but maybe we’ve simply been programmed to think that.

The Great Hack is a documentary-movie on Netflix that tells the story of how Cambridge Analytica (CA) nicked personal data from Facebook, identified the most vulnerable amongst us (‘the persuadables’) and then targeted them during both the US presidential election of 2016 and during the Brexit vote. It very much appears that CA swung the votes in favour of Trump and Leave.EU.

The Great Hack follows the story of one IT professor who simply demanded to know what data CA were keeping on him. And the story of two ex-CA-employees who’d retrospectively had an attack of conscience and wanted to make some sort of amends by exposing the ‘truth’.

This documentary-movie is almost a dystopian horror… except it’s just real life. Yikes. You will certainly feel sickened when watching it. You will wonder why some of the facts revealed in the movie didn’t appear in the UK press. You will wonder if you were influenced/manipulated by CA. You will wonder how we can switch off the machine. Or can we never put that genie back in the bottle.

It’s not a perfect piece of film-making, by any means, and you may not trust a word that of what many of the talking heads say. But it’s certainly a hugely thought-provoking watch, and one to discuss with everyone you know. Very much recommended (if it’s not going to give you an insurmountable degree of anxiety). 8/10

The disorder of ‘The Order’ on Netflix #theorder #netflixreview

So, in quite orderly fashion, a college kid joins a secret magical order (called ‘The Order’). All ordinary so far. But then he’s extraordinarily kidnapped and turned into a werewolf, meaning he’s now a disorderly inside man in the werewolf fight against the Order. We never really find out why the werewolves are fighting the Order, but werewolves aren’t great thinkers, so never mind.

A love interest is chucked in. There are buff boys and bints aplenty. There’s a range of random murders (the police never get involved though, for some unfathomable reason), meaning there really can’t be many students left alive at this college. But no one seems too upset by that, since pretty much all the students are so annoying. There are enchanted blades and stabbings, but magic goo to heal the wounds, except when the series forgets about the magic goo and wants to create jeopardy. There are betrayals (sort of). There’s a kinda cool ‘necrophone’ that lets people speak to the dead, but it gets pretty promptly destroyed (shame). There’s a magical gauntlet that tortures people till they tell the truth (use it on Trump!). Oh, and there’s a deep-voiced mad supermagus with a big old grimoire that might destroy the world… or save it… we’re not sure which and it doesn’t matter really.

This series is utter junk in terms of character and continuity. It shouldn’t work. It shouldn’t be compelling watching. But somehow it is. It’s fairly baffling how it manages to pull it off. True, it avoids clumsy exposition and there are some funny lines… but is that all we need these days? Maybe. Don’t we need logic and credible plotting? Apparently not. Expedience seems to be the name of the game. High tempo and fun rushing around is all we want these days, cos that’s all we have time for in our stressful and hectic lives. I can’t believe I’m saying this: I enjoyed the series and would recommend it to a degree. Says a lot about me, probably.

Find your inner Viking! #Norsemen #Netflix #viking @NorsemenO

Series two of the hilarious Norsemen is now available on Netflix. It follows the story of a village of warriors who have found their way to the west and who go on periodic raids for the new riches to be found there. A competing tribe/clan/group is after the map so that they too can share in the wealth. Much chicanery and double-crossing inevitably ensues. This Norwegian series feels properly authentic (in part thanks to the spectacular landscape and Viking village setting) despite the fact that it contains a lot of modern humour. And don’t go thinking it’s dumb, because the full range of the humour will ‘test’ many a viewer – from surreal humour (with definitely a Monty Python influence/homage), to irony, to slapstick, to visual, to wordplay, to spoof (of A Game of Thrones and The Lord of the Rings), and it goes on. And the humour always has a point, as it sits in counterpoint to the brutally violent lives of the Norsemen – creating a philosophical and psychological interplay throughout.

You don’t really need to have watched series 1 to appreciate series 2, although it helps. And the series is only six half-hour episodes, so you can do a whole series in a single fun-filled sitting, like I did.

My favourite scenes usually involve the Norsemen having a motivational workshop (in which they agree shared values, etc, a bit like in Ricky Gervais’s The Office) or the ‘volunteer’ slave Kark (@oysteinmartnsn) who ‘enjoys the exercise and social aspect’ of being a slave! Fundamentally, the series deals with questions of identity, manliness, heroism, sexuality, etc, but never becomes judgemental or preachy – it always remains whimsical or wry, reflective and cheerful. There’s even a love story at its heart which feels quite credible. It’s all a bit like life, with its highs and lows, but refuses to get bogged down in navel-gazing.

Without giving too much away, series 2 does move the over-arching story forwards, so I’m now awaiting series 3 with relish. I wonder if I can get a cameo role if they film it on location in the west! If you haven’t caught up with Norsemen yet, then you’re missing out. I score it a civilized 9 out of 10.

(If you enjoy Viking fantasy, you might want to check out The Book of Orm too!)

The feds are worse than the narcos in Ozark #Ozark #Netflix

What would you not do to save your family? Would you agree to go launder drug money in the sleepy lakeside town of Ozark for a Mexican cartel? Would you lie to the FBI because you were already complicit? Would you start killing if it then turned out you were treading on the toes of local poppy-growers and about to start a narcowar? What would you not do?

It all starts small for the humble accountant from Chicago Marty Byrde (played excellently by Jason Bateman), whose business partner has been skimming from the cartel. Marty only avoids being executed with some very quick talking and fast thinking. He convinces the cartel that he can increase their profits if they let him launder money down in the south. He’s given 24hrs to uproot his whole family and relocate to Ozark. He then has one month to clean $8m – which proves to be far more difficult than he made it sound. But his troubles are only just beginning…

I’ll stop on the plot there, to avoid spoilers. Besides, as you might glean from the above, this brilliantly dark Netflix series (actually, there are two full seasons already available) is about how ‘good’ people can be led into dark deeds by making a series of small and apparently trivial compromises. It is also very much about how the small lies that people tell (ostensibly to protect others) are actually born from a selfish place and inevitably end up hurting people far more than they protect them.

Some might find Ozark too dark, brutal or lacking in a ‘moral centre’, but for me the show rings true. Nothing is black and white. Everything is morally grey. This is today’s world or, if not the whole world, then definitely Trump’s America. The show is satirical, funny, tragic, delightful, surreal and terrifying all at the same time.

Things happen that seem random… except they’re not. The events always come from decisions made by people. People sometimes make their decisions in good faith, only then to realise they’ve made a mistake. Other people make their decisions in deliberate bad faith. Who tends to win out?

The random events reveal themselves to have been planned throughout. There is genius at work in the writing of Ozark. The twists and turns are surprising, shocking, awe-inspiring and disorienting. We question reality and hold tighter and tighter as we feel it slipping through our fingers. Insanity and the loss of control are but moments away. We dare not look away in case we miss something vital to sense and survival. Utterly compelling. Go watch it. It scores 9.5 out of 10 from me! (Not 10, because I’m scared what that would mean.)