Station Eleven premieres with three episodes on HBO Max Dec. 16.
There’s a dark irony to the fact that filming of HBO Max’s adaptation of Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel about a flu pandemic that wipes out most of human civilization, was interrupted by the spread of COVID-19. That timing could have made the limited series feel either exploitative or irrelevant, but instead, the three-episode premiere manages to beautifully capture the mix of terror and absurdity found in the early days of COVID while delving into how living through a crisis of that scale pushes people to reconsider their priorities.
Like Mandel’s novel, the HBO Max miniseries created by Patrick Somerville jumps backwards and forwards in time and between the perspectives of multiple characters in a way that can be jarring. Later episodes occasionally replay scenes or provide the other half of a phone conversation, fitting together like a slowly assembling puzzle.
The way those transitions are handled varies across the first three episodes, each of which follow a different protagonist. In the first episode, “Wheel of Fire,” out-of-work journalist Jeevan (Himesh Patel) gets a disturbing call from his doctor sister telling him to stock up on groceries and quarantine. There’s an unsettling familiarity to his frenzied shopping trip and the cashier eying his overflowing cart, wondering if he should be concerned about the news.
Throughout the episode, which is filmed in Chicago and shows the city bustling during an alternate version of the 2020 holiday season, there are flashes showing its overgrown, largely abandoned future, demonstrating the utter inevitability of the end. Somerville, who lives in Chicago, changed the setting of this section from Toronto to his home city, which provides some inspiration for spectacular setpieces like a high-rise view of a plane crashing into Navy Pier.
The second episode, “A Hawk From a Handsaw” is set primarily in 2040, showing a world utterly transformed. It centers on Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis), a member of the Traveling Orchestra, a troupe that wanders between isolated communities across the Midwest performing Shakespeare. The Conductor (Lori Petty), the eccentric musician that helps run production, says the only remaining competent actors are those who were children when the plague struck, since all the adults are too traumatized, but Kirstin’s performances are very much fueled by her unresolved grief.
The scenes showing her younger self (Matilda Lawler) dealing with the very beginning of the pandemic have the feel of PTSD flashbacks. The actors for both versions of the character provide ferocious performances as they protectively cling to and fight for whatever human connections they can maintain. While there’s plenty of suspicion, emotional wreckage, and some startling violence in this episode — along with the first hints of the plot that dominates the future section of Mandel’s book — it’s also surprisingly beautiful and funny.
The Traveling Circus has all the incestuous relationship drama you’d expect from a close-knit group of actors, yet it’s also easy to understand why it would be considered one of the best ways to spend the apocalypse. A hilarious scene where a prospective new member auditions for the group using Bill Pullman’s monologue from Independence Day has a bit of the absurdity of the performance of The Empire of Strikes Back in Reign of Fire. Kirsten’s fierceness has a perfect foil in Alex (Philippine Velge), a perhaps overly kind and trusting fellow troupe member who is too young to remember life before the collapse. She keeps asking Kirsten to explain how an iPhone worked, as if the existence of a device that could hold all the plays in the world and tell you how to get anywhere you wanted could only be a fairytale.
Yet the best episode of the premiere is the third one, “Hurricane,” which is also the one that departs furthest from the source material. It zips between 2005 and 2020 to follow artist and logistics specialist Miranda Carroll (Danielle Deadwyler) while also whipping between themes as it touches on the price of fame, the value of creating art, and the agony of loneliness. Miranda finds herself on a business trip in Malaysia as news of the virus begins to spread, and the push to continue going through with a pitch meeting fully captures the cognitive dissonance of working in March 2020.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/3dVynoj
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