Production Company: Universal Cable Productions
Produced By: Sam Esmall, Steve Golin, Chad Hamilton
Directed By: Sam Esmall
Writer: Sam Esmall
Starring: Rami Malek, Christian Slater, Portia Doubleday, Martin Wallstrom, Carly Chalkin
Music: Mac Qualye
Release Date: UK – OUT NOW Amazon Instant Video

With the by-line: ‘Our Democracy Has Been Hacked’ it should be easy to make assumptions about Mr Robot and then dismiss it and move on to something else. A reality television show or a mindless soap opera, both endlessly repeating themselves for your own personal dumbing down.

Mistake one of two!

The opening scene with lead character Elliot – played by the mesmerising Rami Malek – as full time computer security tech and part-time, bedroom, hacker, traps a friendly neighbourhood business man, running a chain of fashionable, hipster coffee shops, but is also a paedophile. Using the skinny latte business to fund hidden computer servers (hidden here meaning from the internet, in the popularly termed ‘dark net’), dispensing pornographic images of children for the price of a cappuccino. The assumptions of Mr Robot go off kilter. And there begins the recalibration of what we think we know and expect from a television series like this; which in many ways is like no other.

And that is one of the pleasing aspects of Mr Robot. Dispensing with whatever clichés you may have wanted to bring to the series, Elliot does not intend to blackmail the paedophile. As Elliot gets up to leave, police cars pull up.

Christian Slater is well placed in Mr Robot, giving his usual low-level – but can not take your eyes off his character – performance. Okay, not Heathers exactly, everybody moves on and Slater is not going to capture that lightening in that particular bottle again. However, his presence will draw in an older viewer and that is no bad thing. Slater is also not the antagonist here either, if anything he is Yoda.

Hacking as a positive force, a force of good, when every news outlet and 24 hour media stream, screams the opposite is one of the things equipping Mr Robot with a sizable hunk of backbone. Mr Robot does not stop there either, Elliot’s hacking code prowess comes to the aid of the love life of his psychotherapist too. Wouldn’t we all want someone like Elliot before we hit that ‘friend’ icon or swiped right on Tinder or accept that Ginder request or Skype call? Just to peek behind the cyber profile on your screens?

The forces of evil, however, in Mr Robot, are never far away and it is not some other less beguine hacker or hacker group. The real evil here clothes itself in business suits and hides its intentions in corporate skyscrapers, beguiling design and hypnotic software, and black SVUs. In Mr Robot, the technology giant, a thinly disguised Google/Apple amalgamation, is known as E Corp, quickly renamed by Elliot as Evil Corp. And whilst Elliot displays some paranoia, there is a sound argument for William Burroughs theory: ‘total paranoia equals total awareness’. E Corp really is against Elliot.

But the point of Mr Robot is not that our democracy has been taken over by the hackers, it has been hijacked by the likes of Google, Apple, Microsoft and Social Media snake oil salesmen. The likes of Elliot are not society’s destroyers but our savours and that is the flipside here.

Some watching Mr Robot will digest that concept readily and wholeheartedly and get it and some will not. The former is alert and will give the world – you and I – hope. The latter are already in the thrill of Evil Corp. And soon, once they are legion, they will come for the rest of us.

Mistake two of two.

Not giving Mr Robot a piece of you time.

 

Reviewer: Steve Hooker