“Extrapolations” is the author’s project of Hollywood Nostradamus Scott Burns, backed by the prophetic “Contagion”, the urgent “Torture Report”, the incriminating “Laundry” and the film noir “Side Effect.” Three of these projects, written by Burns, were filmed by Steven Soderbergh, an auteur film prodigy who for almost 40 years has proven himself to be more of an underwater mammal amongst all of Hollywood’s flora and fauna. different kind of paradise where he always felt like a fish in water (sorry for the pun).
Soderbergh’s regular collaborator (an excellent all-round director, screenwriter, cameraman, and editor) Burns occasionally brings his own stories to the big screen. Extrapolations is his most recent and fundamental project, for which, like Soderbergh, he is both mother and father, screenwriter, director and producer.
Burns’ monopoly over her own offspring is understandable: it’s a complex story about the future world (the show’s eight episodes cover the period between 2037 and 2070), very fragile, buried in its glaciers and melting in the sun. put into the wrong hands. The planet is dying from global warming, people are worried about the extinction of all life, and nature is about to get rid of all its pests as much as possible.
In these different time periods, there are different heroes in the triangular hierarchy in which the character Kit Harington from “Game of Thrones” triumphs – a nerdy billionaire-philanthropist-calculator scumbag from Silicon Valley, who not only watches the beginning, end, but also turns out to be the root cause of it. . In the image of a wealthy IT professional with grumpy and indomitable ambitions, a caricature of Elon Musk can be predicted – deliberately funny and in some ways even tragic.
But fortunately, we don’t have to sympathize with one of the richest people on the planet. On the contrary, Burns’ attention is given to heroes who are simpler in form and full of content: scientists, rabbis, and their parents who are concerned about the finitude of the world and who are trying to somehow delay the sad end. of the planet consumed by human greed.
Top Hollywood stars play this drama of human tragedy. Here are a few hooks that shamelessly captivate audiences alongside Harington: Siena Miller, Tahar Rahim, Marion Cotillard, Forest Whitaker, Tobey Maguire, Diane Lane, and Meryl Streep. The latter, by the way, replenishes his filmography with a new role challenge – equipping his subjectivity and voice with a huge whale, reflecting the fate of the world with the hero Miller.
There are many such innovative decisions about the future world and its inhabitants in Extrapolation – Burns does not even try to hide his delight in his own fantasy dystopia. He likes to look at a world covered in dense smoke, suffocating in polluted air; I like to examine the actions and decisions of heroes on the verge of their own destruction, and I like to imagine a future where beauty is greedily consumed by ugliness.
The diversity and actions of the protagonists transform the series into a patchwork quilt: tightly sewn, but sadly with white threads. Burns’ education deprives the already oxygen-starved world of air residues, and the heroes’ sermon turns a potentially exciting plot into a boring, bloodless text about how bad one person is (we wouldn’t have known otherwise).
Even the pilot episode, which serves as an entrance tunnel to the story for the audience, almost collapses after 50 minutes: Characters, like figurines in a Brueghel painting, clamor and scatter across the entire width of the frame, but in this schematically rendered canvas you can see specific portraits that you can peek into and penetrate, it’s useless. The plot of the series also falls apart: A well-designed story suffers from superficial execution.
Such a mosaic world with so many heroes is not new to Burns – his Contagion, which miraculously predicted the coronavirus pandemic, seemed like solid business. Perhaps the story was saved by the acting ensembles, which did not disturb the harmonious order of the overall structure, and the genius of the jewel-assembly-glue master Soderbergh. But Soderbergh is not in Extrapolations, nor is his talent as an architect.
At the same time, it is important to note that the Burns series itself is an expensive, ambitious and important project, with a clearly defined social impact, namely a social message. It is not in vain that the man-made global warming story was removed by the Apple Corporation, which has been accused hundreds of times of all environmental sins.
Whether the company is constantly trying to whitewash its reputation (“Extrapolations”, Apple’s “Hello Coming!” about conquering the better-than-tormented Earth Moon, people living in the underworld in the post-apocalyptic future), or sincerely hand in hand for the balance of harm and benefit. He’s dealing with his routine.
But dry calculation and hermetic content prevent Burns’s project from achieving all its goals: too arrogant to preach and hardly interesting for fiction, which must replace the dryness of scientific figures with the graceful art of the author’s flight of thought.
British “Years”, published a few years ago, is about the story of a family experiencing domestic problems against the backdrop of a global catastrophe (economic system crisis, nuclear attack, increase in refugee numbers and the emergence of ghetto camps). ), was much more innovative. Balanced between dark humor and a light drama about people – the series is flawed, confused, but with warm hearts and burning eyes. The story of a world doomed to extinction was like a sarcastic anecdote where you laughed the most when your eyes filled with tears. He was bold, unexpected and very recognizable.
The “extrapolation”, which initially erred in the chosen intonation and phrasing, transforms from a bold manifesto about the value of the planet to the index finger of a dried-up hand. The owner is so confused by the landmarks that instead of new horizons we enter a dead end.