REVIEW - Love Death + Robots
Love Death + Robots - Season 1 Review, by Kevin Morley
Tim Miller’s Netflix series, Love Death, and Robots is a riveting series of short stories, animated and for adults, that continues an animated sci-fi theater-fest launched with Heavy Metal and its contemporaries decades ago. The stories in the series are a lot like short stories in an anthology. Indeed, it seems particularly stitched to that approach. While I won’t cover all of them here, there are a few that are riveting on first take or just plain fun and that have a link to cipher-punk ideals. I’ll cover one of those with a nod to several others.
Before I start, though, those of you interested in sci-fi or fantasy shorts, please know that there are a lot of opportunities out there. Whether you binge Arcane on Netflix or whistle up a few short episodes on YouTube’s Dust, the brilliant minds of amateur and semiprofessional authors and filmmakers are living their dreams as best they can. To turn a phrase, “The internet is your oyster.”
I started LDaR with the short video titled “Three Robots.” The three robots have spoofs and likenesses to a number of our more treasured fictional encounters which is hilarious. They don’t act, per se, like those denizens of lore, but they give the viewer a lens into the creative process and what can be expected in some parts of the series. They also go on a tour of a post-apocalyptic Earth. The commentary is brilliant and the end is spot on for the types of twists and turns evident in so many of the episodes.
From there, it gets more serious. I will focus on the dark episode, “Sonnie’s Edge.” This short is a brilliant tour de force of gladiatorial combat…with a twist or two. First, the combatants use a neural link to connect to their gladiator. Through the link, they control actions and reactions as the combat progresses. Second, while the controllers are depicted in the episode as human, the combatants are most certainly not.
The scene is a seedy, gambler-infested, underground warren of scum, both high and low. Sonnie arrives with her beasty for the fight and enters with her crew, exchanging small talk with them as they unload and get ready. She is approached by a well-dressed man who wants a peak at the creature doing the fighting. He is scum of a different sort, and one for which Sonnie has a particular disdain.
Sonnie is depicted as a warrior woman with physical scars from her past evident everywhere. She is also touted as a lone female fighter in the burgeoning business of gladiators. As is her avatar. She is asked to take a dive, but declines. Of course, there are threats and huge sums of money before her team intervenes with a little backstory.
She’ll fight all the way through.
When the scene flips to the arena, Sonnie gets a view of her competition. He is a brute, everything her past has taught her to avoid, and she is more than willing to go to the mat to bring him down a peg or two. The combat is vicious. Sonnie’s slightly human Alien-like character is lithe and agile, with biological adaptations that make it a superior warrior. Her competition is more of a bone-armored rhinoceros with various human movement styles and patterns.
Sonnie is fighting for herself, for her individuality, and for freedom to be who she is and not be told how to act and when to bend the knee. The armored brute appears to represent everything about society that has forced this path on her. The combat is aggressive and relentless with twists and turns as the beasties tear at one other, throwing pieces of each other around the arena.
Throughout the eighteen-minute short, the viewer is challenged by the characters and how they aren’t all as they seem. There is trickery and betrayal everywhere. In the end, both the combat in the arena and what we would expect as the denouement (a fancy literary term from a story arc) are AWESOME!
“Beyond the Aquila Rift” is coming. As are several others.
