Brave New World on Peacock a chilling dystopia in Ikea gray – CNET [CNET]

Westworld is about robots in cowboy hats. Brave New World is about genetic engineering, but it’s also about social conditioning, and over-medication, or the loss of intimacy, or possibly technology and surveillance, and also maybe socialism is bad?

Aldous Huxley’s scathing novel came before George Orwell’s 1984 and presents a sort of flip side to Orwell’s infamous dystopia. Orwell imagined a viciously totalitarian future, and even today, the mention of Big Brother is never far away as authoritarian governments come to the fore. Huxley, meanwhile, imagined a world of repression rather than oppression, a world where we’re all too happy to be distracted from our subjugation. Now nearly a century old, Huxley’s vision was perhaps more prescient as we sleepwalk into a brave new world of our own.

But the fact remains: Huxley’s vision is somewhat wide-ranging, especially compared with The Handmaid’s Tale or 1984 or other dystopian fictions. By drawing on all the book’s various themes, the TV adaptation certainly throws up interesting questions and subtexts. But that also makes it a little unfocused. I’m not trying to be reductionist: This version of Brave New World is absorbing, uncomfortably compelling and beautifully produced. It’s even pretty funny. The creators include showrunner Dave Wiener (Homecoming, Fear The Walking Dead); directors Owen Harris (Black Mirror) and Ellen Kuras (Umbrella Academy); and comic iconoclast Grant Morrison; and they craft an intricately unsettling future — then make you itch to burn it down.

Sure, it’s not as bold or as audacious or as declarative as other recent highbrow sci-fi shows, but that isn’t a bad thing. It’s just ambiguous rather than audacious, carried largely by the characters rather than the concept.

The story begins in New London, where there is no privacy, no family, and no monogamy. Everyone is very happy. That’s because the haughtily emotionless elite of this society accept a tyrannical hierarchy and total lack of personal freedom in exchange for technological trinkets, mood-altering drugs and neon-lit rave orgies. Those bits don’t actually look so bad… I mean, who needs privacy when you can have an augmented reality contact lens? Who needs freedom when you can have neon rave orgies? See — that’s how it creeps up on you.

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There are echoes of Westworld in these two overlapping worlds. One is a future that looks like the future, and the other feels stalled in the present. It’s a fun contrast, but once again the nebulous premise means Brave New World lacks the excitement sizzling from the screen in Westworld. In HBO’s sci-fi western, there’s a simple and direct tension: when are the robots going to flip out? Brave New World is less immediate. Or, to give it the benefit of the doubt, more ambiguous. At least it’s easier to follow than Westworld’s brain-wrecking timelines. But even despite the breadths of themes explored, there are some gaps. Primarily, when a story deals with inequality, genetics and so-called “savages,” it feels like a glaring omission to have no direct acknowledgement of race in the fictional world.

It’s certainly a good time for sci-fi classics coming to the screen. The Handmaid’s Tale already raised the bar for TV (and scored a hit for Hulu). Denis Villeneuve’s take on Dune is coming soon, as is Apple TV’s epic version of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, and Brave New World feels like a curtain raiser for those forthcoming adaptations. It’s a well-made and thought-provoking adaptation, even if it could be a little braver. 

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