Tales From The Loop (2020)

REVIEW BY: ROBERT CHANDLER

It's not easy creating something fresh when making a new sci-fi series. There's so much heritage to draw from, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not. Creators can be so infected by ideas from the past that the new work can never quite shake off the limitations of the material that may have inspired it. 

ALTERED CARBON, for example, is clearly the work of a bunch of people who were blown away by Blade Runner in 1982 and have never been able to move away from feeling that Scott's film was so defining that all representations of the future must look like it.

The new WESTWORLD attempted to be clever in how it used Michael Crichton's 1973 film, telling its season one story via twin narratives that only revealed themselves at the end to be from different timelines. Bravo! However, it could never mask the inherent sexism found in the DNA of the original film concept.

What a relief to find TALES FROM THE LOOP on Amazon Prime. It may have had permission from DARK, STRANGER THINGS and THE KETTERING INCIDENT to evolve and appear before us, but it feels relatively unburdened by other works.

The world created is tangible and aseptic; beautiful, but rusting at the edges. It was based on a book of paintings by Swedish artist, Simon Stålenhag. 

Stålenhag's paintings are fresh and clean; you can taste the crisp air in them. They show Nordic landscapes with utilitarian robots or futuristic buildings, rooted in the real. Sometimes they evoke those photographs of brutalist buildings abandoned in ex-Soviet states, where nature has started to claw back some of its space, but the concrete giants still stand as a symbol of a different time.

The series tells eight one-hour stories of a town in Ohio that has a large hadron-collider-esque loop buried beneath its surface. The loop was built to explore metaphysical science and look into the essence of the universe. And it does, and holds repercussions for the people living up top. Sci-fi stuff and anomalies happen. Stories form.

Each episode is self-contained but is also part of a whole narrative.

The first episode, called LOOP, is a lovely tale about a girl, a boy and the boy's mother, directed by Mark Romanek (ONE HOUR PHOTO). It is both dispassionate and involving, with the source images making their mark, allowing the director to tell the story cleanly and visually.

Further episodes are directed by Ti West (THE INNKEEPERS), Andrew Stanton (FINDING NEMO, WALL-E) and Jodie Foster.

Recommended.