William Gibson’s 1984 bestseller Neuromancer is one of the great novels of the late 20th century, a future-shock treatise on virtual reality, artificial intelligence and the coming digital deluge that feels as relevant today as when Gibson bashed it out on a typewriter.
But Hollywood’s attempts to bring Gibson to the screen have not always soared. The Keanu Reeves-starring take on his short story Johnny Mnemonic, for instance, was all sorts of awful and is today largely remembered for the sentient porpoise that acted Keanu off the screen. Gibson’s script for Alien 3 didn’t even make it into production. (A crying shame, as anyone who sat through Alien 3 will testify.)
The London of 2099, a haunting neverland where the streets have a noirish green tint, is patrolled by faceless automata in flashy suits. Good to know the Westlife reunion is still going strong
So there will have been mixed feelings ahead of Amazon’s adaptation of his 2014 novel The Peripheral (streaming on Prime Video from today), especially when you factor in that it is produced by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, the wife-and-husband team who took the very silly 1973 Yul Brynner cowboy robot movie Westworld and turned it into an even more absurd TV series.
Against expectations, though, The Peripheral is plug-in-and-binge prestige TV of the highest quality. Chloë Grace Moretz and the Dublin actor Jack Reynor play sister-and-brother video-game junkies in the American south who find themselves sucked into a spooky technology conspiracy.
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This involves a virtual-reality game that pings the player forwards to the London of 2099. (The story begins in 2032.) Dystopian London is a haunting neverland where the streets have a noirish green tint and where giant statues loom over the horizon. The city is also patrolled by faceless automata in flashy suits. Good to know the Westlife reunion is still going strong.
What’s it all about? As with Gibson’s novels, The Peripheral chucks you in at the deep end, the nuts and bolts of the plot initially obscured. Unlike the confusing and frustrating Westworld, however, with The Peripheral Nolan and Joy have a map from which to work. There is never the sense that they are simply flinging one mystery box after another into your path in a desperate attempt to keep the drama chugging forward.
Moretz and Reynor are great, too, and entirely plausible as roguish siblings who find themselves in over their heads. The result is a sci-fi lullaby that hits the high notes and rewards those with the patience to stay the course along its many twists and turns.
