I posted this review/promo in TNZ, but I'll post it here too.
I highly recommend the new series
Mr. Robot that will premiere on USA Network Wednesday, June 24th. It sort of came out of nowhere to win the Audience Award at this year's SXSW and it's got quite a lot of buzz and good reviews from the pilot, which you can
watch online here or here on
YouTube.
Mr. Robot is an upcoming American drama psychological thriller television series created by Sam Esmail that follows Elliot, a young programmer (Malek), who works as a cyber security engineer by day and a vigilante hacker by night. Elliot finds himself at a crossroads when the mysterious leader of an underground hacker group recruits him to destroy the corporation he is paid to protect. Compelled by his personal beliefs, Elliot struggles to resist the chance to take down the multinational CEOs he believes are running (and ruining) the world. The pilot episode was written by Esmail and directed by Niels Arden Oplev.
If you prefer a preview first, you can watch a
four-minute sneak peak here.
Here's a glowing
Forbes review calling it "The Best New Show of the Summer and On-Track to be a Modern Classic" which is all the more remarkable because it's explicitly a show about taking down "the corrupt 1% that's ruining the country."
Some spoilers about the plot follow, so read at your own risk.
The show is noteworthy for being one of the few shows or movies that depicts hacking in a mostly realistic way (at least, from my limited layman's perspective). There are no ridiculously elaborate user interfaces and there's no godlike ability to get in anywhere in an instant, and you're expected to have a basic grasp of the tech involved with minimum explanation, or at least be able to look it up (though I did find it questionable that a senior supervisor of a cyber-security firm had to have what a rootkit is explained to her, but that was mostly for the audience's benefit, and the only time they did that). As the review on
The Verge says:
So there I was, watching the pilot and making notes for what I fully expected to be a "7 ways Mr. Robot doesn’t understand computers" piece, when I suddenly found myself… impressed. Instead of the camera zooming through the innards of a laptop, there was Elliot, typing in a terminal window. Instead of using magical computer-god powers to find somebody’s phone number, he walked up to them and got it with some good old-fashioned social engineering. And when Elliot eventually did try to use a program to break into an account, he collected personal information about the subject to speed up the brute force attack — and then it didn’t even work.
A lot of that attention to detail comes courtesy of creator and executive producer Sam Esmail, who, it turns out, has similar feelings about the way computers have been portrayed in the past. "I’m sorry, but every movie and show about hacking is so fucking terrible!" he said in the post-screening Q&A. "And they feel like they have to do all these CGI graphics, and you’re like, ‘Hacking doesn’t look anything remotely like that.’ I’m sorry, Chris Hemsworth does not look like a hacker."
The show has a very unsettling atmosphere to it, a lot of which is delivered by an excellent, subdued, almost otherworldy turn by the lead, Rami Malek. He was great in
The Pacific as well, and is basically responsible for carrying the show, at least in the pilot. Christian Slater is the titular Mr. Robot, head of the hacker group Malek's character Elliot reluctantly joins at the end of the pilot, so his role will likely grow, but so far as of the pilot, everything is told from Elliot's perspective. Christian Slater is great for snark, but he's kind of become the new Ted McGinley for killing off shows that I like, so hopefully that doesn't happen here as well.
Elliot is almost certainly on the spectrum, and will often be off in his own thoughts while people are talking to him. He also has hallucinations that confuse him, which leads to some scenes that would be home in
Fight Club or
They Live (the corporation his cyber-security firm is protecting that Elliot plans to bring down is called E-Corp, but he's convinced himself in his mind that it's Evil Corp, and so the logos and signs around the office and the city start to actually say that). He's also a regular heroin user, so he has some issues to work out to say the least.
Elliot is an anti-hero with zero personal boundaries, despite not liking to be touched himself. He hacks his psychiatrist's computer because he's concerned about her. He knows it's wrong, but justifies it to himself in that he's trying to protect her from her douchebag boyfriend. He does the same with his childhood friend and coworker because he knows her boyfriend is cheating on her. There's an extra bit of squickiness there in that he obviously has feelings for her, though whether he's capable of dealing with relationships in that way remains to be seen. But they don't shy away from acknowledging that while this guy mostly does good and his heart's in the right place, he's got some real creepy stalkerish qualities to him as well that maybe a result of him not fully grasping social norms.
Anyway, I give the pilot an "A" and recommend it highly. If you like
Halt and Catch Fire,
Fight Club, or
Person of Interest, I think you'd enjoy this.
