AMC+'s Pantheon posits a near future in which not one, but two different companies have cracked the code for "charged intelligence" (UI), distinct from AI in that they are not sentient consciousness born from computers, but people born human and then digitized. in the cloud at the end of their corporeal lives. The approaches taken by Logorhythms and Alliance differ on minor points but, surprisingly, both have chosen to implement this cutting-edge science in the same way: stripping UIs of all but their professional skills so they can continue to work hard in the afterlife. , trapped in mock offices with little recollection of any existence beyond work.
Like many of the most compelling sci-fi concepts, it's a setting that feels both implausible and depressingly familiar. (Is there anything easier to imagine than, say, Facebook doing exactly this to its best employees if it could?) And it's something that hits Pantheon especially hard precisely because the animated series is so careful to base its big ideas on recognizable emotions and current realities. It's a portrait of a rapidly changing world that goes to great lengths to document the emotional carnage it leaves in its wake, to gripping, unsettling, and ultimately quite moving effect.
Creator: Craig Silverstein
Stars: Paul Dano, William Hurt, Taylor Schilling
The premiere introduces all three of Pantheon's intersecting stories, but not before introducing some of the show's biggest themes through a high school lecture on Zeus-style violent creation myths and his father, Tiamat. and his sons, Odin and his brothers. It seems that a new world cannot be built without a bloody clash between the old powers and the new, not that any of the bored kids in the classroom bother to recognize this repeating pattern for the foreshadowing that it is. They're too busy sending nasty notes to Maddie (Katie Chang), a shy freshman still reeling from the death of her father, computer programmer David (an irresistibly sweet Daniel Dae Kim).
Elsewhere, another teenage outcast, Caspian (Paul Dano), suffers sarcastic comments at school and much crueler ones from his abusive father (Aaron Eckhart) at home. Rounding out the trio of leads is Chanda (Raza Jaffrey), a prominent engineer eager to step out of the shadow of his super-famous, super-rich boss. Unbeknownst to all of them, they are about to be set in motion on the gears of progress. At the end of the first two hour-long episodes, Maddie found out that David lives as a UI, Chanda was forcibly (and horribly) turned into a UI, and in the show's most mysterious timeline, we've learned that, unbeknownst to Caspian, his entire life is a Truman Show-style experiment orchestrated and overseen by shadowy agents associated, in some way, with Logorhythms' most staunch devotees.
Pantheon's ambition and scope seem to expand with each of the first four episodes sent to critics for review. As Maddie and Caspian discover the hidden truths about their lives, the conspiracies that please them seem to get more and more intricate; As the user interfaces come into their own, Pantheon questions what their new realities mean for their humanity. In a bittersweet moment in episode four, Cody (Scoot McNairy), the still-living spouse of an IU named Laurie (Heather Lind), tries to convince David's wife, Ellen (Rosemarie DeWitt), that these IUs are the humans who they were in life with or without their human bodies.
Meanwhile, Laurie is teaching David a harsh lesson in how inhuman he is by pressuring him to embrace his new god-like abilities in an effort to counter what she fears is the planned obsolescence that Logarhythms has built into its code. UI expansion capabilities allow Pantheon to take advantage of the creative freedoms that animation offers. In contrast to the unassuming and relatively realistic 2D anime style of the analog world, the digital space is one where characters can stretch, flatten, or fracture like humanoids, or slide through walls like the ghosts they are, or reshape the entire world. video. game fantasy kingdoms to your liking. But each step forward seems to make them less like the people they once were, and the same rhythms that guide human existence, like time or the inevitability of death, no longer work the same way for UIs.
Watch Pantheon 2022 Tv Series Trailer
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