Like a lot of people, Vikander has mostly been the perfect face for a robot a nerd like me would fail to not fall in love while sequestered in a dystopian tech magnate's underground bunker. I also really liked her in Tomb Raider, for what it's worth, and think she deserves another crack at being an action star. She didn't make a lot of sense in the role, but she gave it all she had. Then there was Green Knight, where again she was fabulously beautiful as both a pauper and a queen.


This is a show you have to pay attention to. A decent amount of it is in French so catching the subtitles is key and the script is often skewering both how ephemeral our memories of movies (and relationships) are while we as people can't help but talk about them and want to be a part of them because there are so many romantic connotations to both filmmaking and why people do or don't remember or care to share aspects of romance in their lives.


I'm not familiar with the original at all and I'm sure the clumsy title is gonna make this at best a cult show in the HBO limited series canon. But more than anything it's really cool to see Vikander finally (for me, anyway) play this person who simultaneously seems very real, full of flaws and ambitions and style, is clearly NOT leaning into the Manic Pixie behaviors characters like these can often fall into these days YET is meant to be that for both the other characters and the audience. It feels like this weird trick where she just wants to be happy and enjoy her job as an actress, but it slowly becomes clear that her character, Mira, has been cast in this role and the crew is excited to work with her for...reasons! At least for me, it plays into that weird relationship I imagine I'm not alone in having with Vikander as an actress/celebrity where she's a kind of sex symbol that's rarely portrayed specifically as sexy and often seems unknowable both on screen and in public, and to me it's pretty fascinating.


All that being said, if you DO NOT bring that to this show, since it's only got one episode out to far, you're going to really have to enjoy the meta aspect of, hell, the entire episode which is explicitly acknowledging that this is a show about making a movie that's remaking a movie that was about remaking a movie and how it feels to be one, two or three layers removed from the original reference point. If it clicks, you feel smart in a really stupid way, and if it doesn't click...I'd have to imagine it's because you feel so explicitly left out.


In any case, I think it's really cool. Maybe that counts for somebody!

~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz