- Network: Prime Video
- Series Premiere Date: Sep 25, 2020
Critic Reviews
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“Utopia” thinks big to erect its overarching structure, but thinks small to give that structure its support. And it’s loaded with great work from its cast, particularly Lane, a talented actress with a gift for slipping in and out of genres and easily fitting into each.
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“Utopia” has numerous and obvious parallels to current real-world events — but this violent, darkly comic, bizarre and consistently involving eight-part series (I’ve seen the first seven episodes) has its own wild creativity and exists in a universe even crazier than our own. In nearly every episode, something shocking happens.
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Like all conspiracy theories, Utopia’s central narrative ends up being a bit too grandiose and hokey to be entirely believed—which is sort of a relief, given how psychologically enveloping the conspiracy is for the first few episodes. But maybe that’s why I found it unnervingly compelling, too.
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It demands to be binged, but it’s not just a thrill ride. There are so many interesting ideas in Utopia, and little echoes of other great science-fictions, such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and paranoid film thrillers, such as The Parallax View (1974), that it seems unlikely to pause here.
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This show zeroes in on the current social… well, current: panic, terror, distrust, feeling controlled, feeling like no one is in control; the kind of moment when it’s all too easy to believe the most unhinged conspiracists are probably onto something and where everything feels unequivocally as though it’s falling apart for good. It does it stylishly. Generously. Lavishly.
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The conspiracy plot is twisty and surprising, and is the rare plot like this that stays interesting as it gets deeper. A lot of thrillers like Utopia have trouble sustaining themselves past the initial premise in the first couple of episodes, but Utopia remains compelling.
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Utopia is at times uncomfortable and occasionally gruesome, but as edgy dramas go, effectively maintains its momentum from one hour to the next. For those with the stomach for such stuff, that's more than enough to earn a place on a crowded streaming menu.
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Presented across numerous plot threads, “Utopia” is not for casual viewers, or those unwilling to dive deep into the bleak and batty. It's all part of a massive, playful game by Flynn, and it slowly sucks you in.
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Our heroes are meant to be sassy outsiders, the dialogue sometimes strays into teen-movie territory, and I found myself wishing everything was 30 per cent sharper. We can see what's coming, even when the characters can't, which reduces the tension.
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Even with its end-of-the-world urgency, this Utopia still feels sluggish, muddled, unfinished. It’s as if someone went to great pains to restore a classic car, added their own custom interior, and then forgot to fill up the tank with gas.
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Overall it feels like one of those shows that’s hard to judge from the first episode. What we’ve seen so far we like, but we don’t know enough about where the show is going to get excited over what’s next.
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For how well “Utopia” mines modern society’s greatest fears, it’s mainly cultivating them for ambiance, not commentary. ... Ultimately, it’s just another spooky story in need of refinement.
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[It has] a nasty chilliness and a lack of empathy for its characters, who are blunt instruments Flynn uses to deliver shocks to the strapped-in audience. ... The show’s directors (Toby Haynes, Susanna Fogel and J.D. Dillard, so far) keep it moving right along; if it isn’t engaging, neither is it boring. And the cast is uniformly good, supplying more feeling, dimension and humor than the scripts indicate.
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The result could be a fascinating mashup of sensibilities, but instead, the series flattens and settles into a more basic middle ground. Accidentally relevant topics or no, “Utopia” ends up feeling like a decently entertaining version of stories that have been told before.
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Feels curiously stagnant in the seven of eight episodes provided for review. The series incorporates a slew of thematic elements that are eerily timely—an increasingly devastating pandemic, for one—but an overreliance on brutal violence masks the fact that Utopia doesn’t have much to say about the corporate overreach or government listlessness that inspired the show’s concept.
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We get a generic, almost camp flippancy that patronises fantasy/sci-fi nerds, and makes it hard to distinguish this show’s group of reluctant heroes from the protagonists of any Scooby-Doo teen horror.
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Aside from the sense that the show kind of wanted to bludgeon me with a two-by-four to make sure I really, really felt all the torture scenes, my frustration with Utopia is that even in the areas where it’s most relevant, its relevance is just exactly wrong.
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It exploits some of contemporary civilization’s greatest anxieties without saying anything worth hearing about them. ... Utopia’s glib, allegedly humorous scripts never provide such detailed portraits of the characters—probably, in part, because there are just so many of them. At times, Flynn seems to be remixing reality rather than commenting on it.
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Flynn is unafraid of rapidly adding more and more branches to the Utopia mythology, which occasionally shocks but seldom intrigues. After seven episodes, the heroes remain underwritten archetypes, the villains are unconvincingly all-powerful yet constantly screwing up and there are more traumatized but precocious children (Javon Walton, Farrah Mackenzie) than there should be in a fight against the end of the world.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 13 out of 26
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Mixed: 4 out of 26
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Negative: 9 out of 26
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Sep 26, 2020Not even comparable to the original by Channel 4 back in 2013-2014. Heartbreaking and incredibly disappointing.
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Sep 26, 2020
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Sep 26, 2020