Imagine if you will, the director of Fight Club and the director of Deadpool get together to do an animated adult anthology series.
That’s what the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots is… And it’s spectacular.
If you watch the series you can’t help but make comparisons to the film Heavy Metal. You can be forgiven for that because Love, Death & Robots found its origins there.
In 2008, the director of Deadpool Tim Miller and Fight Club director David Fincher were in talks with Heavy Metal owner Kevin Eastman to make a modern sequel to the legendary 1981 film. While those talks fell through, Fincher and Miller stuck together on the idea, looked for a few movie studios to back the project and eventually ended up at Netflix.
In an interview for IGN Miller said,
“Why I like Heavy Metal was because I like short stories, and so anthology just seemed like the great thing to do, to me. Who would know that it terrifies movie-making executives — and people in general — because David and I tried for years, and it was only Netflix that finally said, ‘Yeah, we think that sounds interesting. Here’s some money. Go forth and do something great.'”
If the mission was to create something great I think they far exceeded those parameters.
People who don’t follow computer animation may be shocked at the level of realism in the high-quality visual flourishes that are on display during the 18 short episodes of the series.
This is stunning, beautiful, gripping, gritty, and inspiring animation at its absolute finest.
The stories include alien spiders, farmers in mech suits, Avatar-style monster fights, ghost dinosaurs, werewolves, soldiers, and lots and lots of robots. 16 stories are adaptations from established science fiction writers including John Scalzi, Joe R. Lansdale, and Alastair Reynolds, and two are original stories.
If you’re easily offended by everything then you should stay far away from Love, Death & Robots. In fact, why don’t you stick to Hallmark movies and watching the Weather Channel, and let us adults have fun for a change?
Much like Heavy Metal, there is graphic violence, sex and nudity, and plenty of salty language. This is for adults. And I don’t just mean your age. I mean that if you are offended by stupid shit you should stay far away from this series.
I will be a Netflix subscriber for life if that means I will get more content like Love, Death & Robots, or I’m supporting more experiments of this type.
Tim Miller talked about what Netflix brings to the table in terms of support for creators,
“…and Netflix was super open to it. They’re just so willing to try things, whereas with traditional studios it’s a big risk to do this. It may not work. It may make them look bad. It may cost a lot of money. Netflix says, we don’t know if this will work, but we like it. Let’s try it. It was a whole different vibe.”
How Netflix’s spectacularly weird Love, Death & Robots came together
Since everything on Netflix is based on viewing algorithms, I want to make an impassioned plea for you to take 20 minutes of your valuable time and watch the first couple of episodes of Love, Death & Robots. If you don’t like it then at least you’ve supported some content that might encourage other studios to take a risk once in a while.
If you do like those two episodes then stick around for all 18, it will be one hell of a ride. You will get a hypnotic trip to many different weird, dangerous, and sometimes funny—but always engaging, universes.
And you will strike a blow against the puerile and the mundane. What could be better than that?