‘Love, Death, & Robots’: Different Takes on a Singular Vision

The new Netflix sci-fi series amounts to variations on a theme. Titled Love, Death, & Robots, the 18-episode anthology series is heavy on the death and occasionally throws in some love and robots for added spice. Creator Tim Miller (Deadpool) and executive producer David Fincher (Gone Girl) have promoted the series as a celebration of animation, and it plays like a sizzle reel for some of the boldest animation studios of the day. But, while it may be a celebration of human achievement in this narrow respect, Love, Death, & Robots is certainly no celebration of humanity.

For those looking for Fincher’s fingerprints on the project, Love, Death, + Robots’s closest relation would be Fight Club, where reality is susceptible to schizophrenic reordering, and indictments of late-capitalist social malaise are hurled from the privileged vantage of hyper-masculine exceptionalism. Even when the show postures a feminist perspective on the objectification of the female body or the prevalence of violence against women, its insatiable appetite for gratuitously visualizing these ills undermines any softball attempt at critique.

Viewers won’t need to go beyond the first episode, “Sonnie’s Edge,” from Blur Studio, to catch a whiff of the zeitgeist moving through this apocalyptic assemblage. The tech-noir-influenced, photorealist animation is absolutely stunning, and the images dazzle from the outset. But, once the episode has the viewer’s attention, what does it do with it? Under the auspices of a rape revenge narrative and a thin feminist veneer, “Sonnie’s Edge” subjects its viewers to graphic, blood-spurting sexual violence. And when women aren’t having their heads smashed in or aren’t busy penetrating other men and women in phallic retribution, they are completely unable to keep themselves clothed.