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Looking at the cover of the current failure of the Iberian peninsula earlier this week, thought briefly came to mind that Netflix's marketing campaign for its new science fiction drama, Eternauthad gone too far. The Argentinian mini-series in six parts begins with a strangely similar electrical failure which plunges a city into chaos. Fortunately, he ends the parallels between real life and a story in which a power cut is only a precursor of a toxic snowfall that kills in contact.
Comparisons with other apocalyptic television series – including HBOs The last of us – are, however, inevitable. However, despite compliance with well -known formulas, Eternaut It is not only another end of the derived world, but an adaptation of the novel graphic series considered as a kind of text for the genre. Published for the first time in 1957, then restarted by its author Héctor Germán Oesterheld in 1969 as a more manifest political allegory on military dictatorships, comics were extremely successful in Argentina and very influential on science fiction writers beyond.
The new dramatization is updated to the present day, but also follows a group of friends in Buenos Aires trying to survive the devastation outside their windows. Having played cards when the fatal blizzard struck, the gang is left isolated and cut off from loved ones. Old Bounds soon affects himself while the host Alfredo (César Troncoso) tries to implement a survival plan built on pragmatism and skepticism. “Right now, we are all strangers to each other,” he said to a familiar neighbor.
EternautOpening episodes are a slow burn with patience test, but they effectively capture an atmosphere of confusion, fear and tribalism. Where many apocalyptic shows are generations defined after the end of civilization, this series places us in the days which followed, when the danger is still unknown, the horror unexpected. It is only when one of the groups, the former soldier quietly commanding Juan (the great Ricardo Darín), ventures in search of answers – and his teenage daughter – do we have an idea of the cataclysm scale.
Juan scenes crossing a desolate and strange Buenos Aires dressed in an improvised space combination are impregnated with visceral terror and disturbing beauty. Back in the refuge, frightening circumstances sometimes give way to moments of heat and compassion. However, while the show is generally interested in human nature and instinct in the face of adversity, the individual characters feel finely sketched.
The presence of another world that is looming on history, on the other hand, has its impact from its initial insaissivity. These invisible and insidious forces can be considered as a metaphor for the way tyranny is often carried out in reality – notably by the old far -right regime of Argentina, which has “disappeared” Oesterheld and thousands of other dissidents in the 1970s.
★★★ ☆☆
On Netflix now
