The Lethal Sun

A Review of Into the Night (Netflix, May 2020)

In the old days, they used to have something called B-movies.   They were intended to accompany the A-movie, the main attraction, in the double features that played in neighborhood movie houses, before television came along and ate their lunch and closed them down.  Many of those B-movies were quite enjoyable, but they weren’t exactly Oscar material.  I don’t think there were any B-television shows, certainly none on cable and none on Netflix, Amazon video, and other streaming services.  But if ever there were a streaming television series that felt like a B-movie – in this case, a six-episode movie serial – it would be Into the Night, which started on Netflix in May 2020.

The set-up is quite simple: our sun has turned lethal, literally.  A band of hapless, but fortunately talented, people end up on a plane hijacked in Brussels. It has a pilot, wounded in the hijacking, who is also fortunately still able to fly his plane, before the deadly morning sun arrives.  The challenge: fly west, or further into the night, and avoid the sun – as well as their own dangerous impulses – until they can find a safe place to shelter, if there is one left on the planet.   To add more interest, the passengers all come with serious psychological baggage of one kind or another. And to add insult to injury, the murderous sunlight also ruins the food, making oranges taste like “chalk,” and other fruit like “toilet paper”.

The premise, that the sun’s out-of-whack polarity has made its rays into killers, has zero scientific plausibility, so far as I know.  So how, then, did I come to very much enjoy this series?  I’m reminded of what my late and great editor at Tor Books, David Hartwell, once told me about readers of science fiction:  they will accept a total of one big preposterous element in your story, and if you’re rigorous in adhering to your premise and its implications for the rest of your narrative, they can still love your work.  Into the Night is often riveting proof that the same pertains to binging a science fiction television series.

My favorite part of the series was its intrinsically, blatantly European flavor.  The language is French (with English subtitles) – one of the two languages officially spoken in Belgium – and the major characters are Belgian, Italian, Turkish, and Russian; even some Scottish accents play a supportive role.   There are bad guys and good guys of both genders, spurts of heroism, altruism, cleverness, as well as sheer selfishness and stupidity.   In addition to the life-and-death context that propels the entire narrative, there are ample micro life-and-death situations that the individual characters find themselves in, and this makes Into the Night tough to stop watching.  I watched all six episodes in one sitting.

And as I was watching, I was thinking that, given that this series takes place on the very edge of the end of the world, our time of the harrowing pandemic off-screen makes this an ideal time to watch Into the Night.  Is there any research in psychology to the effect that during the time of a global crisis, watching a story about an even worse kind of global crisis is a good way to kind of get your mind off the real one?  I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a contributing factor in why I enjoyed the series.

I hadn’t laid eyes on any of the actors before, and had never heard of either the book on which the series is based, The Old Axolotl, the 2015 novel by Polish author Jacek Dukaj (translated into English in 2017), or of the “creator” of the series, Jason George, who also gets the writing credit.   That writing, by the way, is actually pretty sharp, and sometimes serves up a winning hipness and humor; as when one character, trying to buck up another character’s desperate attempt to bring a plane safely down on a runway with no prior piloting experience, while using a YouTube tutorial, tells her, “If we land, I’ll leave a good review.” The first-time pilot, Sylvie, has the most compelling backstory, and is well played by Pauline Etienne.  All right, I guess I’ll admit that most of the other characters have interesting backstories, too, though in aggregate this band brought together against the apocalypse, cut off from the world they have no chance of saving, seem a tad too familiar, maybe because they remind me of Lost.

But the ending leaves plenty of room for a sequel, and I’ll be happy to see it.

Editor’s note:

To those interested in literary translation, this show offers a special (if possibly unintended) treat. The dubbed translation appears to have been performed by a different translator or team of translators than the subtitles. You can see some interesting choices made by each team; at times (and perhaps more often than not) the dubbed translation is better, but occasionally the subtitle translation is superior. Or so it appears to this viewer, who does not speak French or most other languages spoken on the show. At least I can vouch that their Russian is good.

-Alex Shvartsman

Don’t Watch Before Dinner

Review of The Platform (Netflix, March 2020)

Parables come in all kinds of formats. The Platform, a Spanish film with English subtitles now on Netflix, is a story about the essence of humanity tested to its very limits. That’s a worthy parable, to say the least. Unfortunately, this movie’s unique way of telling it is disgusting, in the literal sense of that word. The question is: was that kind of stomach-turning story necessary to convey such a crucial message?

The story features Goreng, who finds himself in a “Vertical Self-Management Center,” a tower with hundreds of levels, in which a big feast of a platter is prepared and sent down, level by level, allowing the two people in each cell it reaches to consume as much as they can in a short period of time. Such a set-up allows the people on the higher levels to eat more and much better than the people below them, who are left with successively fewer scraps until there’s nothing on the platter other than empty plates and the longing, furious stares of hungry people. Further, to make matters even more interesting, the inmates, or whatever exactly they are, are sent to higher or lower levels each month, for whatever random reason.

At this point, although watching people stuff their mouths with food is no pleasure to watch, I wouldn’t call The Platform disgusting. But it soon takes a turn which, though logical enough, is certainly physically revolting. When food on the platter is non-existent, there’s always cannibalism. We see this more than once, in blood-dripping detail.

After a series of unsuccessful ventures in moral persuasion – such as trying to convince the people on the upper levels to forego a meal so that the people on the lower levels have a crumb or more to eat – Goreng teams up with Baharat, and together they plan a way of getting the administration of this mostly involuntary hotel to see the error of their system. The two awake one month on a very high level, and a pristine panna cotta is on the platter they receive. If they jump onto the platform with the platter, and take it all the way down to the bottom level, then back up to the top, with the panna cotta uneaten, they can show the administration that the human beings in the tower have self-restraint, and don’t deserve to be treated like animals. Indeed, apropos Marshall McLuhan’s “The medium is the message,” the two voyagers come up with and repeat the mantra that “The panna is the message.”

I won’t tell you the specifics of the very end, except that the mantra changes, and I’m not sure that the new mantra works as well as the panna in this parable. The shift in metaphor feels a little heavy handed. As did the depicted cannibalism and other gross activities that were in one way or another related to food. The movie at least was leavened in places with a little humor – as when Goreng says to a woman who brings her sausage dog with her, “In here, he’s more a sausage than a dog.” My advice: a bit more humor, a lot less gore, would have made this parable more effective. Not that a parable has to be effortlessly palatable to make its point, but it needn’t make you gag.