The whole grandiose promise of Love, Death & Robots comes crashing down when a woman called Greta starts pouring champagne over her breasts before giving an augmented reality PowerPoint presentation with her top off. In sci-fi, the male gaze is often too strong to bear – but here, it’s off the charts.
It could – and should – have been so different. David Fincher and Tim Miller’s expensive and expansive sci-fi anthology series seemingly had so much going for it: a smorgasbord of different animation styles and narrative themes spread across 18 eye-popping episodes. Yet the end result is more akin to a collection of cutscenes from a PlayStation 2 action-adventure game, circa 2002. But with adult themes.
The future, it seems, is a terrible time to be a woman. In “The Witness”, a woman running for her life is forced to writhe naked on a couch in front of her would-be killer before setting off on a near-naked sprint for her life. In “Beyond the Aquila Rift”, we get six minutes into an intriguing space mystery only for Greta, the lead female character, to blurt out, “I never knew anyone could fuck that hard in zero-g”, while said fucker, an all-American hero called Tom, shrugs manfully. Cue champagne-doused sex scene. (Spoiler: Greta is actually an evil space spider with an anus for a face. Joke’s on Tom.)
In “Sonnie’s Edge” – a risqué take on Pokémon in which everyone has comedy British accents and says “cunt” a lot – a fight between a female monster and a male monster climaxes in a none-too-subtle, very squelchy stab in the midriff from a large, penetrating shaft. It’s gratuitous and moronic. A lesbian sex scene follows.
It’s not just a male gaze that ruins Love, Death & Robots, it’s an adolescent male gaze. The sex scenes are so bad they’re funny. At times, the dialogue is borderline farcical. All too often the series leans precariously on visual tricks – and while the worlds created here are vast and vivid, the plots are often non-existent.
It would be funny if it weren’t so dumbly offensive. And it’s a shame, because at times Love, Death & Robots isn’t an unimaginative sexist hellscape. “Alternate Histories” is a tongue-in-cheek multiverse take on the life and death of Adolf Hitler featuring killer jelly and Vladimir Putin on the Moon. In “Three Robots”, neat observations about humanity’s hubris are interwoven with cat and poop jokes. In “When the Yogurt Took Over” – a super cute skit narrated by Maurice LaMarche, the voice of Brain from Pinky and the Brain – we’re treated to the absurd tale of how sentient yogurt takes over the world. It’s fun, it’s unexpected and it’s creative.
But such gems are drowned out by the bilge. Sure, it’s in the name, but the show’s approach to the themes of love, death and robots is more trite than thoughtful. Here, love is the sexual abuse of women; death is the physical abuse of women and robots are either hulking evil things or smart-talking cuties. The exploration of robots works in fits and starts, the rest falls flat. For something with such grand ambitions, Love, Death & Robots has a staggeringly narrow view of the world.
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Even the animation falters. At its best, Love, Death & Robots is visually creative and rich with detail. Ignore the desperately thin storylines and you might even wish you could spend more time in these remarkably well-realised worlds. At its worst, however, the show gets stuck in an uncanny valley of plastic faces and distant, lifeless eyes. Ultimately, the overuse of photorealistic CGI, wafer-thin plots and cardboard acting makes it feel like you’re stuck watching a series of ten-minute long Destiny 2 cutscenes that you can’t skip.
The eclectic anthology format should have allowed the show’s creators to tell varied, imaginative stories – both visually and thematically. Instead, the tedious male gaze focusses on stories where women are abused and objectified. Big-budget sci-fi all too often gets stuck in a violent, masculine world. Depressingly, Love, Death & Robots is rarely any different.
