Drama
House of Guinness
Lawlessness brews in House of Guinness as the children of the late Sir Benjamin Guinness vie for political power and personal pleasure.
A killer vacuum cleaner. A land of immortals where children are killed on sight. A monstrous Santa that regurgitates gifts.
Yep, all are a part of Love, Death & Robots, Netflix’s freaky animated anthology series that promises to shock and amaze viewers with each short episode.
The emphasis is on shock, of course.
The sci-fi series is set in future worlds and distant planets. But to get why it exists at all, we have to go back to the distant past: 1981.
That was the year that Heavy Metal, an animated anthology movie, hit theaters. While most animated films of the day were made by Disney and meant for kids, Heavy Metal (itself based on the illustrated sci-fi comic/magazine of the same name) was packed with graphic nudity, sex and violence. And while it didn’t do that great at the box office, it’s become something of a cult classic for some in the decades since.
Count directors David Fincher (Fight Club, Gone Girl) and Tim Miller (Deadpool) among Heavy Metal’s biggest fans. They liked the movie so much, in fact, that they’ve been planning to do a reboot for more than a decade.
But an R-rated animated anthology movie is a pretty tough sell to make to traditional studios these days. The project foundered until Miller’s Deadpool became such a blockbuster in 2016.
“So what does David do?” Miller recalls for The Observer. “David calls and says, ‘OK, so we’re going to use your newfound popularity to get our anthology movie made,’ and then literally like two weeks after that he said, ‘F— the movie stuff, let’s just take it to Netflix, because they’ll let us do whatever we want.’”
Netflix does let them (along with fellow producers Joshua Donen and Jennifer Miller) do whatever they want. And therein lies the beginning of the show’s problems.
Love, Death & Robots is made up of short episodes, each anywhere from seven-to-18 minutes long. Each can have a wildly different feel, given that different studios in different countries produce each one. Ostensibly, the episodes share only the show title’s thematic elements, with each containing love, death and robots—though some fudge even that a bit.
Oh, another thing they share: potentially extreme content.
These shorts pack plenty of R-rated issues into their brief runs. While the violence isn’t extreme in every episode (and, of course, it’s animated violence at that), it can be. Sex is an infrequent visitor, but you can never be too sure when it’ll show up. As for language? Yeah, sometimes it seems like half the dialogue is made up of profanities.
Love, Death & Robots is unquestionably ambitious and can feature some resonant, even inspiring storylines. But don’t let the animated vibe fool you: The show is made for adults, with each episode featuring a grab bag of potential problems. If Plugged In was to do its own version of Love, Death & Robots, it would create a robot that would love to kill this show’s graphic, and largely unnecessary, issues.
In a retirement community where robots do most of the work, an elderly yoga practitioner and her fluffy dog fight the home’s efficient—and potentially deadly—Vacuubot. And the preprogrammed customer service representative on the phone is of very limited help.
“If your Vacuubot has decided to purge your house of all living things, press three,” the robotic rep chirps. Alas, the rep’s solutions to the problem are not ideal: It tells the homeowner to toss something in front of the Vacuubot to distract it—like a pet. When the woman insists that she’s not willing to sacrifice her beloved dog, the rep insists she reconsider. “Believe this,” it says. “Any pet would sacrifice you in an instant.”
The robot is indeed an efficient and problematic adversary. It explodes the household fish (in a splash of blood) and destroys many animal-shaped objects sitting on shelves. It manages to shave a reverse mohawk down the dog’s head, and the woman suffers a close (and slightly bloody) scalp shave, too. Someone is shocked unconscious. A shotgun blast obliterates a bit of machinery. The woman suffers a sharp shock when she tries to turn the vacuum off.
She also utters the f-word twice (once paired with the word “mother”) and uses the Buddhist term bodhisattva. (We see her practicing yoga, too.) Other curses include “d–n,” “g-dd–n” and “h—.”
Shipped off to a strange, cold world filled with “modded,” or biologically enhanced, teens, 16-year-old unmodded Sedgewick tries to fit in. He joins his modded brother for a night on the town. There he meets other modded teens for a dangerous run on the planet’s ice.
Massive whales lurk underneath the surface of the ice, each capable of swallowing a person whole. They break the ice to breach and breathe, hitting the frosty surface six times (and along a straight line) before breaking through on the seventh. The teens race across the ice—trying to cross the finish line (and reach safety) before the whale breaches and kills them. For Sedgewick, who doesn’t have the same speed or endurance as the modded teens, it’s a life-or-death run. But it’s his brother who apparently hurts his leg, and Sedgewick carries the guy the rest of the way.
The episode does feature that unexpected element of potentially sacrificial brotherhood. But it also features drug use: All the racers puff on a pipe that enhances (or distorts) their senses. We see other youth smoking and toking drugs in the grimy streets, too. We hear the f-word nearly a dozen times (not including a middle finger we see at the beginning of the episode), and the s-word is used four times.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
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