Utopia (2020)

“Utopia” thinks big to erect its overarching structure, but thinks small to give that structure its support. And it’s loaded with great work from its cast, particularly Lane, a talented actress with a gift for slipping in and out of genres and easily fitting into each.

It demands to be binged, but it’s not just a thrill ride. There are so many interesting ideas in Utopia, and little echoes of other great science-fictions, such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and paranoid film thrillers, such as The Parallax View (1974), that it seems unlikely to pause here.

Utopia is at times uncomfortable and occasionally gruesome, but as edgy dramas go, effectively maintains its momentum from one hour to the next. For those with the stomach for such stuff, that's more than enough to earn a place on a crowded streaming menu.

Even with its end-of-the-world urgency, this Utopia still feels sluggish, muddled, unfinished. It’s as if someone went to great pains to restore a classic car, added their own custom interior, and then forgot to fill up the tank with gas.

[It has] a nasty chilliness and a lack of empathy for its characters, who are blunt instruments Flynn uses to deliver shocks to the strapped-in audience. ... The show’s directors (Toby Haynes, Susanna Fogel and J.D. Dillard, so far) keep it moving right along; if it isn’t engaging, neither is it boring. And the cast is uniformly good, supplying more feeling, dimension and humor than the scripts indicate.

We get a generic, almost camp flippancy that patronises fantasy/sci-fi nerds, and makes it hard to distinguish this show’s group of reluctant heroes from the protagonists of any Scooby-Doo teen horror.

Flynn is unafraid of rapidly adding more and more branches to the Utopia mythology, which occasionally shocks but seldom intrigues. After seven episodes, the heroes remain underwritten archetypes, the villains are unconvincingly all-powerful yet constantly screwing up and there are more traumatized but precocious children (Javon Walton, Farrah Mackenzie) than there should be in a fight against the end of the world.

This show is surprisingly good. It has a lot of depth I think people are missing. Yes, it's very violent and shocking but with reason. If you can get passed the first few episodes the violence calms down and the story starts to fall into place. The motivations are quite compelling and the characters have a lot of room for growth. It is not a perfect show by any means but it stands on it's own, separate from the original. I've seen the original and they are two very different shows. They're both good in my opinion. Definitely give it a chance. It'd be a shame if it doesn't get a second season.

I had no idea going into the show that it was canceled after the first season with no resolution to the plot. I would still recommend the series if you want something creative based on comics, like The Umbrella Academy, but with more serious overtones and graphic violence.

On it's own it would not be too bad, however it's just another remake that fails to improve on the original. Go watch the original instead.

This show is too convoluted. The only likeable character is Rainn Wilson’s. Everything else just seems dine for the shock value or for the sake of having som edge. Terrible premise during pandemic times.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]