thisisforspam579

Pour one out for the anime boys, if not only because they're obviously very, very thirsty. Mediocre becomes divine in a drought. And I believe them in this much: it really is one of the best animes for a while, especially on Netflix.

God help us.

Pluto wouldn't be so bad if it didn't put on airs of being something better. If Ghost in the Shell had long, sanctimonious and slightly obvious monologues on ethics in robo-world that nevertheless touched on something interesting, Pluto undershoots by failing to really say anything at all

Chalk it up to a totalised, inescapable narcissism: in this universe there is either the inert thing or the human. But the thing is becoming human-like - oh no! The boundary is blurred! The ego assailed! How could it be? Surely this thought cannot possibly be taken farther!

40 years ago the Cyberpunk genre started with books about AI that transcended humanity in ways humans might only begin to grasp through religious symbols because it was just too *weird* to get our little meat heads around. Humans, for their part, were also evolving to adapt in the increasingly disembodied (and interchangably plastic-bodied) world.

Here we have mummy robots and daddy robots and robots with daddy issues and little brother and sister robots and sometimes they feel sad. It's yet another family drama - robots here are a different human aesthetic - at best a kind of coming-of-age structure in which robots deal with emotional adolescence as they approach adulthood (humanity).

And it's 8 hours long.

The entire history of reality TV has happened since the show's original run, and you'll see some of that regurgitated here. Expect audience reactions, endlessly repeated backstories and a highly curated group of quirky contestants who like being on camera. On top of that, expect plenty of nostalgia - it is, after all, the whole reason this reboot exists.

Higher production, less character - the usual. Same games with a different soul animating them.

But, somehow, it isn't completely terrible, so don't let me put you off a light watch to take your mind off things. I really enjoyed the guards this time around. However, I advise avoiding the English commentary as much as possible - not to idolise the just-about-okay OG commentary from Craig Charles, but Romesh Ranganathan and Tom Davis beg the question of just how bad the state of UK comedy must be for them to find continuous employment.

Yes, it's 8 hours of archive footage with a few bits of text to guide you along. Yes, it does feel long.

Curtis combines his weakness for going on a bit (everything he makes is just that little bit longer than the last, until we find ourselves here) with the weakness of a genre: an almost-pure archive documentary series that attempts to show "how things really were." Or, as the series puts it, this is "what it felt like to live through the collapse of communism... AND DEMOCRACY."

The result is something doomed to be highly misleading, in that it is up to the viewer to remind themselves that these are only the clips Curtis wants to show. It is just as far away from "raw unedited FEELING" as a state news report. Regardless, it's still interesting, if mostly in a voyeuristic sense.

Who else could get access to this footage? And who are we to turn down the opportunity to watch such fascinating glimpses of a period we may never otherwise have seen? Taken as merely a curated collection of clips there's much to celebrate. But 8 hours is a long time to reflect on how much you like a film, and eyes tired of this found footage funeral dirge may begin to question why so many clips are outside of Russia, feel the absense of events unshown, doubt the text or perhaps wonder what exactly Curtis is arguing here, because it definitely feels like he's arguing something.