Binge-r #258: Foundation + Tangle
History Never Repeats: Gaal (Lou Llobell) and Hari (Jared Harris) in Foundation
FOUNDATION S1
Streaming Service: Apple TV+
Availability: Nine episodes now streaming, new episode Friday
Everything about this science-fiction epic is vast: otherworldly location shoots, exotic production design, a schedule planned for eight seasons, and the very themes of mankind’s endurance and survival. Often the camera will pull back from a spaceship so that a character is a tiny figure amidst intergalactic vastness, and sometimes the same thing happens with the plot. Adapted with considerable leeway from Isaac Asimov’s canonised novels, Foundation will eventually become 80 hours of story encompassing 1,000 years of planet-hopping history. How do you start something so engorged? More importantly, how do you progress it? “It’s not a theory, it’s the destiny of the human race expressed in numbers,” declares the instigator of the opening episode, scientist Hari Seldon (Jared Harris), of his renegade theory, and it can feel as if the show has an equally grand mission.
Background noise this is not, but the balancing act between the sprawling canvas and character’s specificity can take time. I’m four episodes in and as a fan of the genre I’m comfortable but not yet fully converted. The audience initially follows the perspective of young maths prodigy Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) who arrives on the capital of the Galactic Empire to work with Seldon just as the conclusions of his new field, psychohistory, predict that the 12,000-year-old monarchy will fall, ushering in a new dark age. For the emperors, cloned from a forebear so that three generations – currently led by the omnipotent Brother Day (Lee Pace) – of the same ruler continue the line unchecked, this is heresy. Deciding what to do with Seldon and his true believers is the first turning point in this collision of collective and individual destiny.
With far-flung strands, the narrative might jump years in an episode, while burrowing into a key moment. Creators David S. Goyer (the Dark Knight trilogy) and the now departed Josh Friedman (the Snowpiercer series) err on the side of promoting the celestial and uplifting early on, but frontier conflict and count intrigue start to supply nuance to the intermittently portentous narration. A reference to “barbarians” offers an echo of Rome’s eventual downfall, but Foundation has to fit around the idea that Hari Seldon – played with impeccable restraint by Harris – foresaw every crisis to come. In that sense he’s akin to a showrunner, mapping out his episodes. “Change is frightening, especially to those in power,” Hari tells Gaal, but hopefully it’s embraced by this show. It’s what this promising drama needs to fully flourish.
Father Doesn’t Know Best: Ben Mendelsohn (Vince) in Tangle
TANGLE S1-3 (Netflix, all 22 episodes now streaming): Generally you’re more likely to find a pre-streaming era international drama has reappeared than an Australian one, which makes the arrival of all three seasons of this knotty Melbourne-set series on Netflix a welcome change. The 40something follow-up to The Secret Life of Us and Love My Way, Tangle aired between 2009 and 2012, exploring a cluster of privileged inner-east families where the parents and their teenage children are equally trying to make sense of their complicated lives. The writing is prickly and the plots studded with recrimination, enabling a cast that includes Justine Clarke, Kat Stewart, Matt Day, and Ben Mendelsohn, who as a combative property developer brings a memorable emotional unease to his every scene. The lack of casting diversity looks dated now, but the show’s ideas about satisfaction and deliberation – why do we do what we probably shouldn’t? – are thoroughly relevant and delivered with confident storytelling.
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: There are a lot of talented actors – Melissa McCarthy, Bobby Cannavale, and Brian Tyree Henry – plus James Corden in Super Intelligence (2020, 105 minutes), but this tech comedy about an A.I. evaluating humanity never gets going; Crank (2006, 87 minutes) is a wired, weird action film with a bitter colour palette and a gonzo lead performance from Jason Statham as a hitman who has to keep his pulse up to stay alive.
New on Stan: Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari (2020, 116 minutes) is a bittersweet family tale of Korean immigrants in 1980s Arkansas that earns its tears with finely accrued detail and a sense of generations discovering each other; Pacific Rim (2013, 132 minutes) is as silly and vigorously entertaining as you would expect from a Guillermo del Toro blockbuster about giant robots fighting alien monsters.
New on SBS on Demand: Booksmart (2019, 99 minutes) is a teenage riot of a movie, a sweet and surprising mix of high school affirmation, adversity, and adventure gassed up by Olivia Wilde’s vibrant direction of Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldman as best friends on a blow-out following their graduation.
>> Missed the last BINGE-R? Click here to read about Netflix’s Paris-in-Los Angeles female friendship drama On the Verge and Binge’s unrelenting murder mystery Vigil.
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