Love, Death & Robots Review

It began as a Heavy Metal remake that David Fincher and Tim Miller spent more than a decade failing to finance, and Netflix finally took it on as an anthology series: short films, most under twenty minutes, each from a different studio in a different style, from photoreal CG to hand-drawn line. Philip Gelatt adapts most of the stories, from writers including Alastair Reynolds, John Scalzi, J. G. Ballard and Joe R. Lansdale.

The best of it is extraordinary. Alberto Mielgo's The Witness and Jibaro and Robert Valley's Ice each won the Emmy for outstanding short form animated program, Valley's Zima Blue is a small, perfect fable about art and memory, and Fincher himself directed Bad Travelling for the third volume.

The worst of it, especially in the eighteen-short first volume, is juvenile: stoic supermen, women as decoration or victims, gore and nudity doing the work ideas should. Critics said so at the time, and the later volumes, shorter and more varied in their writers, are stronger. Taken whole it is a gallery with some brilliant rooms and some embarrassing ones, and the dialogue is rarely the reason to stay.