Severance (AppleTV+): TV Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

SEVERANCE

SEASON ONE - NINE EPISODES - APPLE TV +

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A dramatic and insighftul meditation on the cult-like nature and profound evils of corporate America.

Severance, Apple TV’s sci-fi psychological thriller which just concluded its first season, is one of those TV shows that is a joy to watch despite it being such a viscerally uncomfortable viewing experience.

The series follows the trials and tribulations of Mark (Adam Scott), a rather soul-sucked, dead-eyed worker at an ominous bio-tech firm named Lumen, who undergoes a procedure called “severance”, which implants a chip in his brain in order to separate his work memories from his non-work memories.

Every morning Mark steps into the elevator at Lumen and as it descends into corporate hell, his outside life is erased. Then as the elevator doors open at his assigned floor, he awakens to a repeating, Orwellian, work-day nightmare complete with torture chamber break rooms and mazes of endless white hallways leading to nowhere.

At the end of the work day Mark enters the same elevator and the process is reversed, and he returns to his regular, rather sad life, none the wiser as to what has been afflicted upon him, and what he’s been up to all day at Lumen.

Speaking of which, the job Mark and his three co-workers actually do all day at their computers is a mystery even to them as they do it, as they’re never told what exactly it is they’re doing, but considering the brutal cruelty beneath the fake-smiling façade of management, it is most likely profoundly nefarious.

I will avoid going any further into the plot and machinations of Severance because it is best experienced, ironically enough, with a “severanced” mind that is clear from bias and distractions.

And Severance most definitely should be experienced, because it’s a brilliant mediation and examination of the cult-like nature of corporate America, and the banality of evil that is big business bureaucracy.

Severance resonates because it is deeply in tune with the insanity that is America’s mindless and soulless corporate culture as it becomes, with every passing day, ever more deeply intertwined with the modern-day religion that are the socio-political movements du jour.

Severance expertly but subtly comments on the current cancer that is American corporate culture. Lumen is a stand-in for, among other things, big tech, with its yearning for a thought-reducing social credit system and its compliance-inducing addiction to cancel culture. It’s also commenting on the cavalcade of companies forcing Human Resources-inspired indoctrination seminars disguised as “sensitivity trainings” on their workers, as well as the relentless and vacuous public moral preening and pandering of corporations which they use to distract from their pernicious behavior in private.

Lumen, the morally self-righteous, ethically-challenged company at the center of Severance, is Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Pfizer, Walmart, Goldman Sachs or any other too big to fail behemoth that is above the law and runs our corrupt corptocracy as they exploit and brutalize their workers.

The show is so good at replicating what passes for life in the spirit-stomping, soul-crushing, mind-shrinking fluorescent hell of corporate America that it was at times physically uncomfortable to watch. Having in my younger years been a prisoner in corporate America’s suffocating gulag, Severance triggered my PTSD so severely it made my legs ache and my colon twinge.

The first season of Severance consists of nine episodes, six of which are directed by Ben Stiller. I’ve never been a fan of Stiller’s directing. His previous foray into tv was the Showtime mini-series Escape at Donnemara, which came in as a lion and went out like a lamb. That mini-series was a disappointment as it opened bursting with dramatic potential but ultimately ran out of steam mid-way through and then fell flat on its face at the finish line.

Severance is the exact opposite. The series starts slowly…so slow that I almost bailed on it. But after sticking with it through the first few episodes, I was rewarded for my patience. The series builds more and more dramatic momentum as it hurtles toward the final two episodes of the season which are gloriously nerve-wracking.

A large part of why Severance works so well is its stellar cast.

Adam Scott plays protagonist Mark with a morose aplomb. The great John Turturro is absolutely phenomenal as Irving, the straight-laced company man. Britt Lower is undeniably captivating as Helly, the enigmatic new employee. And Zach Cherry is terrific as Dylan, the master of the mysterious task the office is assigned.

Equally outstanding are Patricia Arquette, as Ms. Cobell, the steely-eyed boss, and Tramell Tillman as her ruthless henchman, Seth.

And last but not least, Christopher Walken gives a sterling performance as Bert, a worker at a different division of Lumen who befriends Irving.

The combination of a culturally relevant story, a well-crafted sci-fi script, deft direction and an impeccable cast, make Severance an alarmingly compelling series and one you should definitely check out. It starts slow, but stick with it, it’s well worth it.  

©2022

The Only Thing Dumber Than the #HandsOffAnastasia Twitter Furor is the Dreadful Movie That Sparked It

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 28 seconds

Some Russians have taken offense at Anastasia Romanov’s cartoonish depiction in a low-budget movie released earlier this year. They shouldn’t waste their energy on a criminally stupid piece of film making.

In case you haven’t heard, #HandsOffAnastasia is the outrage du jour on Twitter. If you were unaware of this controversy, I deeply envy you. Here is a quick breakdown of how #HandsOffAnastasia came to be. 

In Spring of this year a terrible movie titled Anastasia: Once Upon a Time came and went and no one cared because it was laughably low budget and hysterically awful. The film is a live action kids movie that tells a fantastical tale of Anastasia Romanov time traveling, with the help of a wizardly Rasputin, from Russia in 1918 to Madison, Wisconsin in 1988 in order to evade Vladimir Lenin and Yara the Enchantress’s malevolent grip. To give you an indication of the caliber of movie that Anastasia: Once Upon a Time is, here are some highlights…Rasputin has a break dance battle at a mall, plays video games and models in a fashion show, there are some absurdly random musical numbers, and a Filipino comedian plays Lenin.

I am no expert on Russian history, but I am pretty sure the film is not entirely historically accurate. And this is where the outrage comes in…apparently some Russians are up in arms that “Hollywood” would denigrate Russian history and besmirch a Sainted Russian figure like Anastasia Romanov, who was brutally murdered by Bolsheviks at age 17 with the rest of her family, by comically re-imagining her tragic tale…thus #HandsOffAnastasia was born.

More kindling on the #HandsOffAnastasia fire is a clip from the film circulating online that shows Anastasia eating spaghetti with her hands, thus implying she, and all Russians, are uncivilized barbarians.

Sadly for me, this whole #HandsOffAnastasia situation forced me to watch this stupid movie. My assessment is this…how do you say “much ado about nothing” in Russian?

First things first…Anastasia: Once Upon a Time is obscenely amateurish and ridiculously imbecilic…but it doesn’t make Anastasia out to be some Neanderthal anti-princess. The spaghetti eating scene isn’t mean spirited or even “anti-Russian”, it is just unconscionably lazy movie making.

The other thing, and this is the most important point, is that this film is so inconsequential as to be absurd. Why anyone, anywhere would care what it says or does is beyond me.

This is not some “Hollywood”, big budget operation backed by the marketing muscle of Disney. The movie was produced by Congolomerate Media and distributed by Freestyle Digital Media…not exactly Hollywood heavyweights…in fact they don’t even qualify as flyweights…or Hollywood, which is why no one has ever heard of this film until this silly controversy.

The budget for the film is bare bones, and it shows in the locations, cheap special effects and shabby costumes. Whatever money they did have seems to have been almost entirely spent acquiring the rights to the Cindi Lauper song “Time After Time”, which it uses liberally (without Lauper’s pricey vocals) throughout the film for no discernible reason.

If I could point to one remarkable thing about Anastasia: Once Upon a Time it would be that it boasts the largest collection of the worst Russian accents ever captured on film at one time. The biggest star in the movie is Brandon Routh who plays Tsar Nicholas II. Once upon a time Routh played Superman on the big screen, and in Anastasia he reveals his kryptonite is twofold…acting and a Russian accent.

The film is produced by Armando Gutierrez, who also did no one a favor by casting himself in the critical role of Rasputin. The film would have been better served casting an inanimate carbon rod in the role instead of Gutierrez.

On the bright side, there is exactly one good performance in the film, and that comes from the talented Amiah Miller, a young actress who played Nova in War for the Planet of the Apes.

Besides that the only interesting thing about this movie is that on its IMDB page it actually lists Anastasia Romanoff as one of the screenwriters. That is an intriguing marketing ploy but simply cannot be true because if the real Anastasia ever had to watch this dreadful movie she would run into the basement and shoot herself just to end the misery and embarrassment. I am sure that last joke offended some people…but here is the thing, if you have the time and energy to get upset about that lame joke or about this nonsensically preposterous movie, then you really need to get a life.

This isn’t to say that Hollywood, like the rest of America, isn’t Russophobic. It certainly is. It isn’t to say that Americans aren’t historically illiterate about Russia and ignorant about Russians. They certainly are. It is to say that this third rate clownshow of a movie is so laughably trivial that it should never ever generate any emotion, be it positive or negative, from anyone, anywhere.

#HandsOffAnastasia is, like so much of Twitter culture, a function of people with too much time on their hands searching high and low, far and wide for something, anything about which to be offended.

In conclusion, the hypersensitive Russian woke folk of #HandsOffAnastasia desperately need to keep their hands off Twitter and go out and re-connect with their heritage by doing truly Russian things…like competing in a break dancing battles at the mall, or modeling in impromptu fashion shows, or eating spaghetti with their hands.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020