Streaming platforms / The human heart of “Eric” and the cold nature of “Atlas”

“Eric” with Benedict Cumberbatch (in great acting form) is an existential and deeply disturbing adventure, which among Netflix’s selections looks like a gourmet dish among easy and quick fast food spectacles. On the other hand, there is also a sci-fi adventure about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence, with a script that – strangely – looks like it came out of an Artificial Intelligence machine

A search for a lost child in the heart of the city

Eric

Available from Netflix

A neat six-episode miniseries, set in the wild and decadent New York of 1985. A wild-tempered city at a time when homelessness was skyrocketing, AIDS was claiming lives, graffiti covered every wall and train car, and police violence was out of control before Giuliani gentrified the alleys and violently wiped out sinful Manhattan.

The imposing metropolis of the US East Coast in the mid-80s was a haven for penniless artists and petty criminals, with the subway overrun with the desperate and disturbed and the fumes from the air ducts covering the filth and the half-eaten by rats garbage bags. That’s the perfect setting for “Eric,” a new Netflix drama about a kid who gets lost on the city’s infamous streets. Vincent (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a talented puppeteer on a children’s television show, similar to American television programs such as The Muppet Show. When his nine-year-old son Edgar disappears on the way to school, Vincent’s world falls apart. Vincent’s precarious relationship with his wife Cassie (Gabby Hoffman) crumbles, his fragile truce with his wealthy parents turns into all-out war, and he slips back into substance abuse. Accompanying Vincent on this journey into mental breakdown is Eric, a large, mouthy and, above all, fantastic puppet that Vincent makes to his son’s specifications. Eric is the brainchild of the British writer Abby Morgan, who has signed commercial work – the cheesy biography of Margaret Thatcher “The Iron Lady” with Meryl Streep – but has explored the darkness of the soul, as in his “Shame” Steve McQueen. Much of the action takes place in the dark underworld of New York. At the center of this is Vincent: an angry, obnoxious, misfit who embarks on a quest for Edgar despite his personal limitations. The investigation involves Michael Lendroit, a missing persons officer (played by McKinley Belcher), who takes on the disappearance case, which will bring him face to face with an environment of intrigue that would make even Serpico faint. There’s a quiet rage lurking beneath that calm look of his, one that resists the prejudice Landroyt himself faces daily as an undercover gay black cop. The revelation of corruption in the New York Police Department, as well as the murders and kidnappings of children complete a dirty kaleidoscope.

“Eric” has a lot to say about grief, trauma and creativity through a dense mystery, with a narrative influenced by both Fincher’s “Zodiac” and Alejandro Iñárritu’s “Birdman.” Mixing true crime and social realism with the hallucinations of a giant blue monster is no easy task. At times “Eric” feels overloaded, like it’s two series in one, with the tone shifting from family drama to crime thriller. But ultimately, magical realism turns from a symptom of Vincent’s fundamental imbalance into a fully-fledged narrative pretext for a complex and vibrant series.

Science fiction with nothing scientific and no fantasy at all

Atlas

Available from Netflix

After a documentary characterized as a monument to narcissism and self-referentiality (“This is me now”), a second documentary on the making of the previous one (“Greatest love story never told”) and the hypocritical hunt with the world’s scandal-mongering tabloids around marriage -fireworks and the inevitable divorce from Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez for some reason took it upon herself to star in a sci-fi adventure about an “Artificial Intelligence terrorist”, Harlan. In the prologue to “Atlas” we learn how it came to threaten humanity with extinction, wiping out millions of people before abruptly leaving for Space. After 28 years an AI robot and a scientist named Atlas Shepard (Jennifer Lopez) are called as a special agent and board a spaceship bound for the planet where Harlan is supposed to be hiding. Atlas carries the weight of the world on her shoulders, in a script that has usurped all the obvious stereotypes we’ve seen in movies about people in space. Will AI destroy humanity or save the world?

Behind the soulless dialogue, annoyingly average plot and strangely ineffective performances is the struggle of a woman who does not accept Artificial Intelligence, ending up in the clichés of the worst b-movies. Even if you accept that our heroes are so spectacularly incompetent that they can’t see the most obvious traps, you also have to accept that the most intelligent being in this galaxy would let their enemies die a slow death in an unguarded room with lots of useful tools, which could completely reverse their plans of extermination. A few days ago it was announced that Jennifer Lopez has canceled her summer tour. I wish he had time to cancel the filming of this expensive vaccine as well.