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[Mr. Robot]: Sex, Lies, and Video Codecs
Jacobkosh
Gamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
Gamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
Mr. Robot is a new TV show on the USA Network, airing on Wednesdays at 10/9 central.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U94litUpZuc
Elliot Alderson is a serial hacker, his extreme social anxiety driving him to learn about the people in his life by violating their privacy - and to play god with their lives when what he learns displeases him. Elliot Alderson is also a functioning morphine addict with an uncertain grip on reality. By day, he works as a technician at Allsafe, a firm that provides internet security to the world's largest global conglomerate, E Corp. E Corp is also the company that killed Elliot's father twenty years ago when a spill at one of their plants gave the workers cancer.
All of this is about to come to a boil the night Elliot meets a dangerous, mysterious hacker legend known only as Mr. Robot...
Mr. Robot is a paranoid thriller and social document that, to me, calls to mind films like π, Fight Club, and Michael Clayton - like those movies, it's interested in the intersection between revolutionary change and personal madness and how one can fuel the other, and like those films, it has genuinely cinematic ambitions. The entire show is lit and shot with an eye toward verisimilitude and the grit of reality. People's apartments look like real spaces; offices look like the place you work, not like movie sets. The hacking is done from command-line prompts - no "VIRUS UPLOADING..." or Swordfish double-keyboard blarney here. At the same time, however, the show features some very David Fincheresque visual flourishes, moments of visual poetry and hyperreality.
Each episode's title cards and credits play smoothly and confidently over the action of the cold open like the beginning of a movie. The music is dark, thrumming, ambient electronica with synthy beeps and boops.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jcysJu8zTwFrom a production standpoint, the ambition on display is enormous; I know that sounds weird to hear about a USA show, which have traditionally been fun popcorn viewing, but Mr. Robot clearly marks the network's grab for the brass ring. Or the token ring HA HA HA CYBER HUMOR
But high production quality, glossy visuals, and sweeping themes are...well, I don't want to say meaningless, but they certainly mean a lot less without solid writing to back it up. And Mr. Robot does back it up. The show moves effortlessly from breathless thriller to introspective character study to surrealistic nightmare to boardroom drama, while maintaining a consistently cool, detached tone that never slips into actual coldness or heartlessness. The plot is compelling, and yet I almost wish it would move more slowly, because I enjoy spending time with all these characters and all their strange little worlds.
Oh, and speaking of them:
Rami Malek as Elliot Alderson - A hacker vigilante who sees himself as set apart from, and possibly above, ordinary people, who he struggles to relate to. Nonetheless, he tries to help people where he can, which brings him into the orbit of the anarchist hacker collective "fsociety."
Portia Doubleday as Angela Moss - Elliot's best friend since childhood, now a manager at the security firm that employs them and his patient guide through the workaday world. Angela has her own demons, though, and a chance meeting on a street corner is about to bring them out.
Christian Slater as Mr. Robot - The mysterious figure who runs "fsociety" from a disused video arcade, driven for unknown reasons to commit revolutionary acts with little regard for their human cost.
Carly Chalkin as Darlene - Another hacker at fsociety and Elliot's main contact there, Darlene is a snarling and truculent master of malware who wears her shrivelled little heart on her sleeve.
Frankie Shaw as Shayla Nico - Elliot's friendly neighborhood morphine dealer.
Michael Gill as Gideon Goddard - The owner of Allsafe, Elliot's employer, Gideon takes his job seriously and pushes himself to get to the bottom of fsociety's plot.
Martin Hallström as Tyrell Wellick - An ambitious executive at E Corp, Tyrell exploits fsociety's hack to begin a ruthless ascent toward the prized CTO job.
The train's coming. They know you're onto them. You've only got seconds to decide. Are you in or are you out?
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Posts
How do I maek watch this if USA Network does not exist?
No, I also wanted to say that I simply loved how, in episode five, (spoiler obvsiously)...
Unsurpassed. It has so many layers of genius I don't know where to start.
I guess I would start with the fact that this takes the omniscient, autistic superman formula that is a popular basis for tv series these days and just deconstructs it wonderfully.
I'm having a lot of trouble believing you guys. I feel like I'm witnessing an elaborate practical joke, like any moment you guys will take back the praise with a "gotcha!".
I have avoided this show so far because I hate TV tropes enough, but putting them in specific areas of interest tends to make them unbearable. Even if this isn't CSI Cyber, is it still able to treat the subject matter reasonably?
The main character having a beautiful woman \ mom figure to take care of him already suggests it's going to go weird places, then having a goth\pixie hacker girl competitor makes me think it's going to do some boring, typical TV gender role stuff.
Production values is great tho.
Do you like unreliable narrators?
Aahahahahahaha
@the notion of Darlene being a MPDG
it's not a typical show, I will say that
I remember thinking this would be a terrible show from seeing the same promo at the movies numerous times. I caught it on tv early on just to see if it was, and was blown away by how bad they advertised it. It's easily USA's first stab at creating a show that would have the same caliber as AMC.
Personally it's that it's getting more and more unpleasant as it goes on.
I also really do not care, at all, about the executive level guy's storyline.
at all.
This is the most accurate TV show in regards to hacking/computers/servers/programming that I have ever seen.
I don't think we are supposed to care about him
I treat his whole storyline as kind of like American Psycho and its purpose seems to be to show how corrupt and soulless it really is up there amongst the executives
I don't think he is supposed to be even the tiniest most microscopic bit sympathetic.
One of the first scenes we see with him "outside the office" is where he drives to an underpass and pays a homeless dude so the homeless dude will passively allow American Psycho boy to beat him severely in the face.
He is a monster, was the takeaway.
The first hurdle to get anyone to watch this show is the GIANT WALL created by the name "Mr. Robot".
I can see people's eyes glaze over as soon as I say the title and these are people with whom I regularly talk about TV and we have very similar tastes.
She's the one actual friend that Elliot has managed to hang onto for any length of time and the frustration that Angela experiences in dealing with someone with the type of social and mental problems that Elliot has are portrayed very realistically. She has to restrain herself from just screaming at him to fucking act normal for once, because dealing with someone like Elliot is unimaginably frustrating - most people would have cut him off a long time ago.
But it is an excellent show. The production is incredible. Every title shot feels like a good movie is about to start. The writing is very solid as well.
A friend made a comment that struck me - this show is straight-up cyberpunk. It's cyberpunk set in the modern day, not the near future, with runs on corps and a varied crew of runners and all the other genre trappings, except it's been eviscerated of most of the power fantasy elements, like cyberware and other sci fi stuff. So we get a panicky, claustrophobic, paranoid sense of scuttling behind the scenes and defenselessness outside of anonymity. It's very good.
Yuuuuuuuus
this is a great description
Last night's little bit near the end was also a pretty strong sign of that
Then he outs his murder to Elliot and reveals that goddamn he fucking loved the rush of power it gave him.
Kind of hoping Elliot or Darlene gets him with the popcorn gun in the end.
Also I nominate the pistol hidden in the hideout to be forever called "The Popcorn Gun"
SERIOUS SERIOUS PENULTIMATE SEASON 1 EPISODE SPOILERS WITHIN DO NOT CLICK UNLESS YOU'RE CAUGHT UP OR DON'T MIND MAJOR SPOILERS:
I'd suspected he was a hallucination midway through since you rarely ever see Mr. Robot interact solo with anyone but Elliot but wasn't sure if they were going to go that route since it'd been done before. Now with that concrete, I really want to start picking those scenes apart [such as when Mr. Robot/Elliot goes to the one fsociety dude's place after Shayla's death and he is just losing it.
MASSIVE SPOILER IN HERE
But I also think that's going to set up and inform the finale, too. Fight Club ends with Tyler "dying" and the buildings collapsing, bringing an "end" to debt. My guess for how this season ends is Elliot and Executive Guy pushing the button and bringing down Evil Corp. This will lead to a bunch of Project Mayhem like hangers on with not quite Anonymous masks and with Former CEO guy starting Evil Corp 2.0 from the ashes. The king is dead, long live the king. Elliot's lady friend (I'm awful with names) will be working for Former CEO in season 2 and Executive Guy will swoop in there, too, so we'll get the drama of them butting heads in season 2 as Executive Guy tries to blackmail/use Elliot to bring down his rivals in Evil Corp 2.0
Helluva show. This week's wasn't as crazy compelling as last week's, but that's ok. We needed a step down, the explanation and then the finale next week should be bonkers.
And, yeah, the name was an instant turn-off to me but Alan Sepinwall talking about how good the pilot was got me to check it out and I was in from there.
Just like... nailing the utter banality of the whole thing. Not some group of evil assholes twirling their mustaches or anything like that just "well, we gotta get rid of this somewhere. Oh hey shrimp."
Nope. It was just business. As meaningless as sending an inter-office memo.
The scenes bookending that episode were SO good.
And we have their whole conversation framed in really tight shots of the two of them, but then suddenly we cut to a wide angle when the guys in back call time's up and abruptly lunge forward and grab her to drag her away. It's violent, shocking, and it communicates both the emotional truth of the scene--their last conversation as a fleeting bubble getting popped--and also the plot-relevant fact that Sheila is right, these guys are serious, she's fucked, and her flat affect reflects an utterly accurate understanding of the hopelessness of her situation.
Elliot still doesn't understand, though. He wants to save everyone. And here we have a TV show bold enough to say: he can't.
And that ending! Madness made manifest, as the continuous background of the shot is prisoners running helter-skelter under the pooled floodlights. And that soundtrack. The soundtrack of this show is so good! Here: grinding, hostile insane-o thumping noise as the situation continuously degrades. Elliot's wide-eyes agony. And the trunk! We see his face as he opens it, and then it's these spinning shots around him (MADNESS MADE MANIFEST) as he tries to process what's happening; we see just her bare thigh, for a second, in the corner of the shot. Of course, we know it's not okay. It is horrifying. And we get an epically long, continuous reaction shot.
Of course, we do eventually have to swing back and see her full body: I'm convinced that this is just a constraint of television writing (otherwise 15% of the audience wouldn't get it). I think it would have been better not to. But whatever. It was still fucking phenomenal.
Honestly, I had been kind of cooling on the show in episodes 3 and 4. But that was just such phenomenal TV. Sweet jeez.
And this show makes great use of one of my favorite little editing tricks, which are called "audio advance" or "J-cuts" - it's when, at the end of a scene, the camera continues to linger on the visual of the current scene (a close-up of a character's pensive expression as they sit at home) while the audio track has moved ahead to the next scene (the sounds of street traffic in Times Square), It's interesting how flexible a technique it is: you get to stay past the end of a scene and just kind of watch its aftermath instead of cutting immediately away from it, which can enrich the impact of what has just happened, but it can also be an efficient time-saver (show a guy getting up from the bar going "ugh, I think I had one too many," audio switches to sound of flushing toilet, cut to the dude washing his face in mirror - you've just gotten the guy from the bar scene to the bathroom mirror scene in a 0.5 second audio clip without any walking around, opening of doors, zipping of flies, etc).
Mr. Robot seems to like to use this transition to kind of jar us with the dissonance between the visuals and audio. We see Tyrell staring ahead blankly out his office window while the sound of the next scene is a party - or whatever. Or at least that's the impression I've had going through it so far. I'm curious what I'll see when I eventually rewatch.
I'm torn on the question of goofiness. I get it (and usually feel the same way)--but at the same time, one of the things I like about the show is the heightened reality of it all. I kind of like how it's like stepping into a fever dream. So I'm not sure what to think.
having watched episode 8 now,
i didn't spot that big reveal earlier as some did, but there was definitely something very off
it casts the show in a much different light, retroactively, and i like that they were willing to wait 8 episodes for the full payoff on that
This show does some of that stuff, visually, although obviously not with the same "let's blow $10m on this one three-minute sequence" elan, but I think that whole approach kind of underpins the show. Despite all the gestures toward modern questions of privacy and wealth distribution and so forth, this is actually an intensely private, personal story, but with the addition of corporate conspiracy, sinister Chinese hacker armies, characters with alliterative comic-book names like "Gideon Goddard" or a monstrous cyberpunk executive named "Tyrell," it takes on this kind of mythic, larger-than-life dimension.
I think the sense that this is a world where anything can happen, from the mundane to the melodramatic, adds to the tension and the sense of subjective reality in a way that a Wire-like po-faced verite would not.
Boring, boo, don't care show more hackers
Maybe more Christian Slater, Slater-ing it up
Won't deny it's well made though!
http://www.usanetwork.com/mrrobot?cid=ps_Mr-Robot__Launch_2015Q2_
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