by Mike Hilty, Contributing Writer
Welcome to Cross-Platform Partners! In honor of a new movie release, I have selected a TV show to watch to pair with the movie. Think of it as a way to get hyped for the new movie, a preview of things to come, a means to tide you over if the movie won’t be released where you live for a little while, or a change of pace if you’ve run out of related movies or sequels.
For April, I paired Mr. Robot with The Amateur!
As someone who has worked in several different technology companies, ethical hacking is becoming increasingly necessary. As hackers become more sophisticated in their methods, movies and television have developed various ways to incorporate hacking into their narratives. Even this year, there have been a few TV shows that deal with hackers, such as Zero Day and The Hack. Rami Malek has had the chance to play numerous versions of analysts and hackers, as he now does in The Amateur. Before that, though, his most prominent role as a hacker was in Mr. Robot.
The series is about a cybersecurity employee named Elliot Alderson (Malek). Suffering from a variety of afflictions, Elliott is recruited by a hacker group called fsociety by someone named Mr. Robot (Christian Slater). One of the organization’s tasks is to eliminate everyone’s debt worldwide, which is controlled by E Corp (or Evil Corp, as several characters on the show refer to it). Elliot doesn’t realize the world he’s stepped into is much more sinister, connected, and weird than he can ever realize.
Right off the bat, Mr. Robot is a crazy show that has so many twists and turns that it’s hard to keep up. Between the twists of the organization and the family reveals scattered throughout the series, Mr. Robot positions itself as one of the most twist-filled shows I’ve seen in a long time. Couple this with a highly unreliable narrator/main character in Elliot, and the show’s perception of reality is deeply skewed. In the cyberworld, everything can easily be misconstrued through misinformation and deepfakes. It can be jarring at times, but it also requires you to pay close attention and never trust that what you’re seeing is face value. Season One starts relatively tamely, but the further along the show gets, the more dicey it gets.
Malek is so incredibly unhinged as Elliot that it’s hard to deny his incredible performance. Winner of the Emmy for Best Actor in a Drama series in 2016, Malek takes all the twists and turns amazingly well. Most notably, as a main character, Elliott is as unreliable as they come. Through everything, Malek does a great job of distorting reality while also conveying grief and anger once he figures out what caused him to get to this point in his life.
In addition to Malek, several performers are giving excellent performances. Slater is crazy, waffling from a truly unlikable good guy to an unsympathetic yet somehow likable villain. He helps to blur the reality even more than Malek does. In addition, numerous characters in Elliot’s life come and go, with trust becoming an issue. One of his friends, Angela (Portia Doubleday), goes from coworker/friend to working with E Corp in quick succession. Moreover, Elliot’s family is highly involved in cybercrime, which makes the stakes more personal for him. Darlene (Carly Chaikin), Elliot’s sister, is another character whose allegiance is unclear.
Mr. Robot’s greatest strength is its messaging about what people’s online lives say about themselves. Everything has a dual persona, from businesses, organizations, and foreign countries, to individual people. The show conveys this by visualizing the depths to which people will go to protect their online privacy, while also illustrating the lengths to which others will go to hack into someone’s personal information. In addition, the series goes to great lengths to demonstrate the power that access to information holds. Possessing information is far more valuable than possessing money in this world, which is why organizations like fsociety are attractive to people to join.
Mr. Robot is a weird show. It’s a distorted thriller that will cause you to question everything you watched. Malek is electric, the support cast is outstanding, and the story is bizarre yet captivating. Weathering all the twists that happen will be key, and it can be tough to stomach how weird the show is. However, for those who love a mystery wrapped in an enigma, this might be the jigsaw puzzle you’ve been waiting for in television form.
You can read more from Mike Hilty, and follow him on Instagram, Letterboxd, and Serializd