And while the images are comparatively unremarkable - the UK Utopia was a visually stunning piece of television - the violence is just as visceral. The show is steeped in genre storytelling, often times resembling a comic book itself.Ī great many changes have been made, immediately setting it apart from the British original. While some conspiracies are harmless - for instance, no one cares if Tom Cruise worships Xenu - others have real-world consequences.īut Utopia never pretends to be a documentary, or even as realistic as something like, say, Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. Although it’s interesting to observe how, in the span of just a few years, the pendulum has swung from audiences perceiving fast wealth as aspirational, to now being suspicious of it.Įven though Cusack’s character - Dr Kevin Christie - is an American, I’m worried that Utopia might play into the Trumpsters’ narrative that the Covid-19 virus was manufactured in a Chinese laboratory. ![]() Every night at the dinner table, he asks his family the same question: “What have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world?” Cusack brings a quiet menace to his performance that is far too subtle for the show, which is shrill to a fault. It’s a disconcerting experience, for sure.īut while the UK original featured a faceless organisation as the ‘villain’, the US remake, like most US remakes, simplifies things, by casting John Cusack as the ‘pharma-bro’ antagonist. In fact, the show, in many ways, is as prescient as the fictional comic book that everyone in it seems to be after. With a central plot that involves a shady pharma company, major infection hotspots, and the looming threat of a large-scale outbreak, I won’t deny that I got the heebie-jeebies drawing parallels to the ongoing pandemic. Meanwhile, a shadowy organisation known as The Harvest, also looking to get its hands on the precious manuscript, is hot on their heels. ![]() They’re convinced of this because the book’s precursor seemingly predicted major tragedies such as the SARS and MERS epidemics. Based on the cult UK series of the same name, Utopia is a conspiracy thriller about a group of nerds who band together to locate a comic book manuscript that they believe contains information about future pandemics.
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