A sad and strange sci-fi about itinerant performers who tour post-apocalyptic Canada with Shakespearean productions.
A few years after the mysterious flu epidemic, only a tiny fraction of the population survived. Someone settled in small towns and tried to build a new society, someone turned into marauders looking for defenseless wanderers on the desert roads, and someone, like Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) and her comrades, decided to preserve the remnants of the past culture and travel around across Canada, along with a troupe of actors performing Shakespearean tragedies. From year to year, wandering artists freely moved around the settlements and enlightened those few who wanted to hear about the misadventures of Hamlet or the love of Romeo and Juliet in the middle of pitch hell, but one day everything changed. The heroes began to be pursued by a certain Prophet, the leader of a handful of sectarians who were ready to do anything to administer their own justice in the new post-apocalyptic world.
The plot of "Station Eleven" begins, however, long before these events. The starting point is the play "King Lear": one of the first to be killed by a virus is the life of the main actor, movie star Arthur Linder (Gael Garcia Bernal). His public death will set off a chain of events and unite Jivana (Himesh Patel) and baby Kristen (Matilda Lawler) on their way to a frightening future. The meticulous and detailed prelude here is not without reason: "Station Eleven" unfolds in different time intervals and tells about several heroes at once, many of whom were somehow connected with the poor fellow Arthur. From the first three episodes, it is already easy to guess what this plot will lead to: all the characters who miraculously survived in the nightmarish and chaotic world of the future, unexpectedly for the viewer, will appear not as random strangers, but as people united by a series of common stories. The twisted script belongs to the pen of Patrick Sommerville, the creator of the series "Maniac" and one of the authors of the cult "Left Behind". His craving for monumental, novelistic structures in Station Eleven is justified by the form itself: the mini-series, now and then crushing into microplots, is more like a book thought out to the smallest detail.
It is not surprising: "Station Eleven" - the film adaptation of the bestseller Emily St. John Mandel. The original novel can hardly be called outstanding, innovative or breakthrough for the genre, but it nevertheless managed to capture with special sensuality the details of the old world, which we, without even noticing it, had already managed to take for a boring routine: airplanes and electricity, telephones and cars, soft bed and books. Modern life on the pages of "Station 11" turned into an ephemeral dream, into which every now and then the heroes plunged, doomed to cold, hunger and nostalgic torment in the terrible present.
Sommerville's adaptations are still far from this emotionality. The writer and producer are more interested in the quirky futuristic setting and its charismatic inhabitants. In its best moments, "Station Eleven" looks like a tragicomedy hit from small American festivals: colorful, absurd, but invariably sad and hiding complete disappointment with life behind a cheerful grimace. The very concept of wandering artists, dressed in rags and touring on a cart with horses, seems to have migrated not from canon post-apocalypticism (I Am Legend, 28 Days Later), but from Terry Gilliam's films, where fantasy mixes with reality.
And even the main characters here are charmingly abnormal: director-demiurge Gil (comedian David Gill) seems to have gone off the rails for a long time and argues with old colleagues over the interpretation of the classics, while the world is falling apart, and Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) is eternally suspicious and feels a threat in every stranger - with such leaders it is not difficult for everyone else to go crazy. In the serial adaptation, the rhymes of theatrical life and the harsh everyday life of the future become even more important than in the original: Sommerville has the whole world and has one big theater, and the survivors in it are the actors of the Shakespearean production, whose fates have long been predetermined by the ruthless demiurge.
And at the same time, the genre for the screenwriter, unlike the writer, is of paramount importance: Sommerville plays with tropes and plots, tries to reinvent post-apocalypticism and desperately rebuilds the visual code of musty science fiction. This is partly detrimental - instead of a revisionist view of the simple joys of life, he only gets a stylish sci-fi without a double bottom. On the other hand, let's be honest, who else in recent years has dared to turn the end of the world into a carnival on bones, and reflections on the nature of humanity into one big allusion to Shakespeare's classics? For this courage, in general, you can fall in love with "Station Eleven" in advance.
This article was sponsored by Kate Corliss
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