Fresh off the smash success of Top Gun: Maverick, a rousing display of American pop cinema that felt like a return to normalcy after the last couple years’ worth of COVID calamity, Joseph Kosinski’s other film from 2022… kinda feels like a rebuttal to his own work.
It’s set in the titular prison complex, where the inmates are given a degree of freedom and leisure in return for participating in drug trials run by the charismatic Steve Abnesti (Chris Hemsworth). The story primarily focuses on the idea of emotional modification, and pharmaceuticals in general, as a deconstruction of the very idea of control and free will in the face of something capable of so utterly altering a person’s state of mind. A bit odd that this comes hot on the heels of what is essentially military propaganda as cinematic art (not saying it’s bad, just calling it how I see it), but makes a little more sense with how limp the commentary gets here.
I mean, the circumstances behind the people who are in Spiderhead as volunteers raises some interesting ideas. Wanting to alter themselves as a kind of retroactive correction for past sins (an idea that I have quite a soft spot for), what it says about standard American prisons when this is seen as the better alternative, or even taking the self-punishment aspect of imprisonment further through some of the scarier applications of chemical influence shown here. The actors do well with their roles here, from Miles Teller as one of the inmates Jeff, Jurnee Smollett as his love interest Lizzy, Mark Paguio as the complicit bystander in the experiments, and Hemsworth especially brings some of that El Royale swagger to his presence here as the guy overseeing the whole thing.
However, those performance high points are often the result of trying to work against the material given, rather than with, and I don’t exactly blame them for doing that. Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick are capable of fine work when they’re being sly or subversive or just straight goofy, but cold and calculated satire isn’t exactly in their toolset. As such, their feature-length adaptation of what was originally a short story published in the New Yorker comes with some pretty juvenile moments. The ‘Shitfingers’ running joke felt entirely unnecessary, and as much as I kinda get the gratuitous sex scenes as part of the overall theme of emotional manipulation, the framing ventures a little too close to my Berserk Button concerning ‘sexual abuse towards men = comedy’. It’s like an adolescent attempt at a Black Mirror story, and even when that show was at its silliness, it never got quite to this point.
It doesn’t help that the script doesn’t really go anywhere with its ideas. Or, at least, anywhere that hasn’t already been explored in other stories. Much like Steve himself, it seems to be a lot more focused on just how people react to certain stimuli than getting any deeper into the implications and ramifications of such stimuli. The examination of the importance we place on emotions is decent enough, and I like how it manifests in Steve mainly as someone with more money than stability desperately looking for approval (again, quite a familiar read for today’s high-and-mighty), but as sci-fi meant to provoke thought, it doesn’t do a whole lot.
This whole production feels like a middle-of-the-road side project for all involved. Nothing too daring, nothing too intense, nothing too thorny, and yet nothing too objectionable either. The cast are alright, the visuals get a lot of mileage out of the Queensland landscape, and even if it’s unfortunately shallow, it makes at least some decent points about the human desire for a cheap fix to their emotional problems. This was always going to feel smaller in comparison to Top Gun: Maverick, both as cinema and as pop culture impact event, but I was hoping that it would be a little more substantial than this.
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