A group of young adults, who meet online, get a hold of a cult underground graphic novel, which not only pins them as a target of a shadowy deep state organization, but also burdens them with the dangerous task of saving the world.
Nothing and no one is safe or sacred in Utopia... There are no good guys, only people who have the right endgame in mind. And that endgame is brutally imaginative, fantastical, and violent. You can't stop watching.
Utopia is fast-paced, violent, oddly funny and sinister - the remake has a lively formula that works and should be a crowd-pleaser for mature audiences.
[Utopia] might prove worth the wait, but it's hard to say. On the evidence of the first episode, this is big budget but low stakes: a very American utopia.
Utopia is one of those confusing shows that has just enough awesome moves to make you feel confused and conflicted about the wealth of unexplored character impulses, and it is "timely" in a way that could make you feel a little patronized.
Even though Cusack's character - Dr Kevin Christie - is an American, I'm worried that Utopia might play into the Trumpsters' narrative that the Covid-19 virus was manufactured in a Chinese laboratory.
Maybe there's a way this version of the show could have been subversive, necessary, and vital, but it ultimately refuses to commit to introspection or conversation around the tropes it plays with.
"Utopia" is littered with parallels to the country's pandemic predicament, but it's all stuck inside a cartoonish vacuum that even when the series is on the cusp of forming a breakthrough, it only becomes sillier the deeper down the rabbit hole you go.
