In SILENT SEA (Netflix), a team of Korean astronauts travel to an abandoned moon base to recover research materials that could save Earth from a growing, dire water shortage. The result is a pileup of typical thriller and survival horror tropes. The series is overall fun and has some good ideas, though it’s far more Hollywood than what I’ve grown to love about Korean series making.

It’s the future. Earth is in dire straits due to desertification and water shortages, resulting in conflict, die-off, and rationing. Song Ji-An (Bae Doo-Na, familiar for me from her roles in SENS8, CLOUD ATLAS, and KINGDOM), an astrobiologist, is recruited for a team led by Han Yun-Jae (Gong Yoo, THE SQUID GAME and TRAIN TO BUSAN) to go to the moon. Their mission? Penetrate an abandoned research base and recover materials from a project that may be able to solve the water crisis.

The set up is cool, it’s Korean dystopian sci-fi, some familiar solid actors, count me in. The only trick is immediately a bunch of thriller tropes are piled on. The ship fails, they don’t have enough air, the highly fit astronauts exhaust themselves over a reasonable hike in a fraction of Earth’s gravity, the base’s systems are pretty broken down. The crew yell at each other but otherwise often don’t communicate well, with Song Ji-An staring blankly when she should speak up or even move to save herself or others.

After catching so many terrific Korean series and films like THE DOOMSDAY BOOK, TRAIN TO BUSAN, SQUID GAME, HELLBOUND, SWEET HOME, FLU, DERANGED, THE WAILING, and so on, I just don’t think it lived up to the standard I’d grown to expect. God help us if Korean directors look at their Netflix success and start to think they need to tailor their stuff to the U.S. market. Hollywood needs strong alternatives, not imitators.

All that said, I liked it. The characters aren’t lovable, but they are likeable enough. The pacing is a bit off, but once things get into high gear, it really rolls. The monster element is creative, I loved that part. The base is a cool setting and there are some good ideas. Critics and audiences seem to agree that this is a good show, and I can’t argue with that. Overall, it’s a good popcorn watch, definitely watchable, even if for me it didn’t live up to other terrific Korean movies and series.

From director Yeon Sang-ho (TRAIN TO BUSAN) and based on a popular webtoon of the same name, HELLBOUND is Netflix’s latest Korean series that shows what can be accomplished with great characters, bold ideas, and a challenging story. Hollywood, take note.

The story rolls out a bit like a loose mosaic focused around a bizarre, horrifying phenomenon and how humanity reacts to it, with multiple characters and a three-year jump into the future halfway through the six-part series. The phenomenon is simple: various people are visited by a spirit that tells them the time and date of their death and that they are bound for Hell. At the appointed time, monstrous creatures arrive to smash them to a pulp before whisking them off to the infernal realm.

As the phenomenon becomes widely known, various groups arise saying it is God’s judgment for sins, creating a new worldwide religion based around analyzing the judged sinners and interpreting their sins as pronouncements about God’s will. This new church seems far more concerned with power than truth, however, and its violent adherents go to extreme lengths to shame and attack sinners and their families. If you’re on God’s side and helping with His will, anything becomes justified, including the worst sins. While the judgments and terrible monsters are horrifying enough, particularly the waiting for them to show, the real horror is in how people start to do evil thinking they’re doing good.

Thematically, HELLBOUND reminded me of THE LEFTOVERS, where humanity is faced with an impossible change that stubbornly and maddeningly remains unexplained, and then struggles to project meaning onto it, with varying results. It plays on the idea that the divine isn’t all unconditional love but instead fertile ground for cosmic horror. The show goes so much farther, though, with its powerful intellectual ideas about meaning, religion, what constitutes sin, what role humans have in judging it, and so on.

I absolutely loved this one for its sheer intellectual audacity, challenging ideas, and utterly new take on cosmic horror. Highly recommended.

Just finished MIDNIGHT MASS on Netflix, and WOW. If you’re looking for a brilliant horror story that also serves up a powerful analysis of religious belief, you should stop reading this dumb review and start binge-watching now.

If you’re still with me, here goes: MIDNIGHT MASS is the creation of Mike Flanagan, one of the creators of THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, which I also enjoyed. In this story, a mysterious priest arrives at a declining fishing island to take over a Catholic church, but he’s not alone. Soon, miracles and deaths start occurring, forcing the ensemble cast of locals to choose sides in what some seems as a spiritual war and others as a threat to the entire world.

Flanagan gets pretty much everything about this miniseries right. As a creator, he often leans heavily on theme, and MIDNIGHT MASS is no exception. The theme here is the search for meaning in life when all things die, how this affects people differently in good and bad ways, and the struggle to know an all-powerful God that seems to be unknowable. I tackled a lot of these themes in my novel THE CHILDREN OF RED PEAK, and while I went for it and produced something I believe is at least thoughtful, Flanagan utterly dominated it. His script contains these long, wonderful monologues that are really meditations and shaded views on purpose, meaning, life after death, and more. He overdoes the expository dialogue at times, but I didn’t mind as it’s good stuff.

I’ve always been fascinated by this theme, which is a tough one to tackle right: the question of whether life has any inherent meaning if death is final, and the question of whether a higher power is guiding us to a higher purpose. I’ve always felt if you strip out the human longing and projection, take out the idea that God has a paternal love for each and every one of us, God is actually a source of cosmic horror, an all-powerful being that inflicts great suffering and occasionally helps us based on its plan and that maybe can be appeased with the right behavior and sacrifices. Flanagan shows us all this and makes us feel it while being respectful to all sides of the conversation. Flanagan asks the question, and the characters provide a multitude of answers.

Back to the show… The acting is terrific, with some familiar faces from previous Flanagan works like Kate Siegel, and led by Hamish Linklater, whom I’d only seen previously in THE BIG SHORT. Playing Father Paul, he chews the scenery and absolutely dominates every scene he’s in. Paul is such a greater character, a deeply spiritual and religious man who is at heart good but who deludes himself into interpreting a great evil into something miraculous and Godly. Bev is another great character, a very religious and proper lady who uses her religion to justify her prejudices and spite, and who has a Bible verse to rationalize pretty much anything she wants to do. All the characters are great, in fact, all of them feeling real without the usual “small town stock” cast. The show has been compared to Stephen King’s work, which is justifiable as we have a small town of good, plain folks encountering and seduced by a great evil, but Flanagan goes so much farther with character and theme that in my view he comes out ahead in a league entirely his own.

I could go on, the terrific horror element, the absolutely terrific bloody climax, the organic and realistic pacing, etc. Suffice to say, I thought MIDNIGHT MASS was brilliant and loved it, another example of the golden age of television we’re currently in.

In the sci-fi series RAISED BY WOLVES (HBO), two androids are sent to a wild planet to start a new civilization after religious wars turn Earth into a dying planet. I loved this one, though it could have been shorter, and it ends on a PROMETHEUS-style note that left me a little wanting.

The series focuses on two androids who are raising a small colony of human children. Their creators’ goal is to restart human civilization without religion, as it was religious war–between atheists and followers of Mithraism–that destroyed Earth. Mother is a necromancer, a war machine the Mithraists built from their ancient texts but don’t fully understand, reprogrammed by an atheist scientist to be a caregiver. Father is a service robot. Together, they work to raise the children, though they have conflicting parenting styles and are learning that humans are difficult, most of all difficult to control. When a Mithraist ark spaceship appears in orbit, they face the potential challenge that the old divisions will follow them to this new world.

At first, I wasn’t sure about it, as the androids are initially stiff and the costume and tech designs fairly generic. Then it grew on me, and it grew on me some more until I was utterly plugged in. Ridley Scott directed the first two episodes, setting the tone for the look, feel, and pacing, and it works. The acting is terrific, particularly the androids and some of the Mithraists, particularly Travis Fimmel (best known before this for his role in THE VIKINGS). The necromancer is utterly badass when in war mode, making for some of the most exciting scenes in the show. I enjoyed the religious conflict element and the various conflicts related to parenting. Overall, I greatly enjoyed how immersive and engaging it was based on multiple strengths.

I had some issues with it, though. The pacing drags at times, as the primary conflict plays itself out and then regenerates to try again. The main characters appear unkillable. There’s so much human drama going on it makes you think the human race will die on this planet in about two years. There’s a “god” like element, something messing with everybody’s head, that goes unexplained. The biggest sour note for me, however, was the ending, where little is resolved, way too much is dumped into the second season, and there seems to be a giant nod to Scott’s PROMETHEUS franchise–which I decidedly did not enjoy at all and eventually gave up on.

So yeah, I had some issues with the show, particularly the unsatisfying PROMETHEUS-style ending, but overall, I have to say I loved it for its overall quality, heavy immersion, and engaging characters.