There’s only one way to escape the Spiderhead in George Saunders’ cunning postmodern short story “Escape from the Spiderhead,” and it rhymes with skip-to-my-lou-icide. Unlike print fiction, where pretty much anything goes, movies featuring acts of self-harm have to be very careful, as audiences have been known to imitate those same acts. In the preface, Netflix warns viewers of its woefully misguided adaptation that the film features such behavior. But if Netflix really cares about our well-being, why would we shoot a movie so bad we’d do practically anything to escape “Spiderhead” ourselves?
No one will blame you for sampling them in the first place. Saunders is a more sinister humorist with more awards in writing than Oscar-winning Meryl Streep. The challenging source material was translated by “Deadpool” duo Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who understand how to walk the line between outrageous and offensive, and then handed over to “Top Gun: Maverick” captain Joseph Kosinski, who clearly didn’t. The Netflix logo might give you pause, but it has a permit from The New Yorker Studios. (The magazine was the first to publish his story, and this is in turn one of the first features it produced.) Plus it stars Chris Hemsworth and Miles Teller and a man with tattoos covering half of his body, big enough to eat both.
Ta Doom! So I gave up and clicked play, and immediately felt like something had stopped. If you’re familiar with the short story, everything seems fine. But for the vast majority of people — who don’t even bother reading Netflix plot capsules, let alone the short stories featured in The New Yorker — “Spiderhead” will be their first encounter with the dark Saunders. The hypothesis is practically muddled.
Set in a futuristic research facility like Spiderhead, “Spiderhead” is where prisoners of serious crime are offered an alternative to hard times: they can take part in a series of drug tests conducted by a sociopath named Steve Abnesti (Hemsworth). The medications in question have tongue-in-cheek names, such as Luvactin™ and Darkenfloxx™, complete with small brand symbols. (In the movie, they were also given alphanumeric identifiers, randomly assigned from a bingo card. Because someone thought that might be funny.) Said experiments use chemicals to manipulate human emotions and behavior: love, fear, honesty, and obedience. Verbaluce™ stimulates language centers. Vivistif™ works like Viagra™.
Before the Abnestic can give his subjects these mood-altering substances, they must orally say the word “confess.” But the real manipulator here is Abnesty, who bullies and coaxes his subjects into completely inappropriate situations. Situations like this—like forcing someone to administer Darkenfloxx™ to a woman, Luvactin™ warned them to screw up three times in quick succession, effectively prompting her to have sex with others—are very hard to make funny when performed by real people. To be clear, there is not a single word or gesture that closely resembles human behavior to be found in the entire movie.
Even if there was, Hemsworth isn’t the right actor for the role. Sure, we’ve seen him funny before (he plays the Ghostbusters’ Airhead assistant in “Ghostbusters,” for example), but the comedy here is supposed to come from how incredibly cruel this guy is—that and largely unprofessional experiences , which crosses pretty much every line imaginable, in terms of morals. So it’s not enough for Hemsworth to stand up and appear cute, clench his jaw and offer joke lines like, “Beautiful people walk away a lot. I say I’ve taken advantage of myself many times.” Because there is no joke.
Reese Wernick didn’t understand it. They think it shows “She Blinded Me With Science” by Thomas Dolby during experiments.
Kosinski does not understand. He thinks he’s directing two Luvactin™ subjects to meet each other like a pair of Tex Avery cartoons, while Swingle Sisters communicate side by side.
Actors do not understand. They’ve been trained to find reality in their roles, but Saunders’ sense of humor is so unbelievable that Peter Sellers would have been wise to top with her full performance.
Tomatically, there’s no easy way to play Abnesti or the human guinea pigs, each one of whom has been locked up for a truly gruesome act — like infanticide, murder, or licensing the rights to George Saunders’ stories on Netflix. Everyone except Jeff (Teller), whose crime was his punishment. Jeff drank and drove into a tree and killed his best friend. So full of visual effects, Kosinski shows the incident in flashbacks that it looks like a scene Baz Luhrmann left out of The Great Gatsby. Kosinski then returns to the same incident later, revealing another victim.
There’s a reason Kosinski and his cohorts decided to make Jeff more sympathetic than he was in the short story. In the short story, Jeff smashed his friend’s head with a stone. But the film team focuses on the idea of escaping from the Spiderhead. They do not believe that schmuicide will lead to a happy ending. (Okay, okay. But the movie has a sad beginning and middle, what difference does it make?)
In the movie, Spiderhead is a neat concrete hideout on a remote tropical island that is only accessed by a biplane. Apparently the architect has seen some James Bond movies. But what this has to do with Saunders’ story is anyone’s guess.
Surely someone must have read the source material and realized that the movie would go in a completely different direction. What direction will it be? Imagine Michael Bay’s version of “Flowers for Algernon.” Or the Stanley Milgram Study was reinvented as an action movie, complete with poorly structured fights and low-budget explosions.
Saunders’ story is amusing. Not his best, but it definitely lives up to the other novel that appears in The New Yorker. Amid laughter designed to make readers uncomfortable, Saunders aspires to better understand what drives certain human behavior. Could you make medicine that makes people feel happy or excited, hopeless or obedient, with no lingering effects of those feelings? How is that different from what our bodies experience like love or pain?
But the moment you ask a group of actors to play the same script for real, everything falls apart. Kosinski is a talented director, but his specialty is juggling human elements with complex visual effects. It’s not cut out for this kind of comedy. His design choices are all wrong. Execution is tone deaf. And even Oscar-winning editor Stephen Merrion couldn’t save her (he couldn’t save Charlie Kaufman/George Clooney’s “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind”).
And so, it left us feeling queasy watching people forced to act against their will, according to the drugs loaded in MobiPaks™. We are asked to believe that Abnesty may have installed the same device on himself, that he would leave the keys to his secret drawer for Jeff to have access to, and that everything the short story left unexplained could be untangled when Jeff looks inside said drawer. . impossible. Or by the movie’s shaky rules, we don’t admit it.
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