![]() ![]() ![]() (There is some sparing, canny use of 20th century pop music, including a moving live rendition, for voice and tuba, of “Midnight Train to Georgia.”) When something violent happens, it is against that same unemphatic, unexplicit background, minus disturbing sound effects and musical underscoring. ![]() Silence and stillness are the series’ aesthetic hallmarks, against which even small gestures register. There is only one brief big special effect to denote the End of the World, which is largely handled through absence, as people lock themselves away in hope of survival or die off-camera - empty public places, shots of stranded cars, piles of snow and ranks of icicles where a functioning society would have called in the plows and heaters, and quick cuts between the before and after. It is an action film nearly drained of action. John Mandel’s 2014 novel, on which it’s based but from which it departs significantly in details, events, characters and characterizations, it jumps between periods to build out character relations and motivations, and to plant the seeds of coincidence that will flower into closure. The years of chaos have largely passed, and the survivors we meet, in the environs of the Great Lakes, live a largely communitarian, pastoral life, free from the usual neo-feudal warlords and Mad Max types it is more Renaissance Faire than New Dark Ages. “Station Eleven,” whose first three episodes (of 10) premiered Thursday on HBO Max, is a post-post-apocalypse tale, set largely two decades into the future - 2040 by the series’ timeline - and also just as and some time before a flu pandemic wipes out nearly everybody on Earth. ![]()
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