Upload Review Amazon’s SciFi Tech Satire Is Fun But Familiar

Upload Review: Amazon’s Sci-Fi Tech Satire Is Fun But Familiar

Greg Daniels returns to TV with the sci-fi tech satire Upload, which has some fun with some rather familiar ideas about our tech-driven culture.

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Upload Review Amazon’s SciFi Tech Satire Is Fun But Familiar

It’s been a minute since Greg Daniels, writer and producer of such series as King of the Hill, The Office, and Parks and Recreation has been front and center on a new TV show. But he’s back this May with the one-two comedic punch of Netflix’s Space Force (with Steve Carell) and Amazon’s high concept tech-comedy, Upload. The latter will make its streaming debut first, bringing erstwhile Arrowverse star Robbie Amell to a technology-ridden near-future where, for a hefty price, death can be cheated, thanks to some powerful technology that effectively uploads a person’s consciousness (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) into a computer simulation, one that’s run by a gigantic corporation and is thereby fettered by microtransactions that effectively turn a manmade afterlife into a ridiculous pay-to-play arena.

It’s a smart concept, one that Daniels makes hay out of early on when he introduces Amell’s self-involved but mostly affable Nathan Brown, a would-be app developer engaged to Ingrid Kannerman (Allegra Edwards), a wealthy socialite whose family happens to be major players in Horizen, the company behind the upload technology. To that end, the world of Upload is advanced but familiar, in ways that are both good and bad. Daniels and his writing team take obvious pleasure in building a not-so-distant future America, where Bloomingdales is now a convenience store and mega-corporations have merged, resulting in some ridiculous ads and mashed-up company names.

But the sense of familiarity isn’t just in how Upload has imagined a future where the inequality between rich and poor is even greater, or in how technology can liberate and suppress users at the same time. It’s in how the show’s notion of an, ostensibly, digital heaven feels a bit been-there-done-that with regard to recent shows like Black Mirror or, more specifically, The Good Place — which was, of course, created by Daniels’ Parks & Rec collaborator, Mike Schur. To be fair, the two shows take wildly different approaches to their concept of the afterlife. One is a seemingly inscrutable place that’s a bureaucratic (and literal) nightmare and the other is a corporate-sponsored construct that only the wealthy can afford. In that, Upload adopts an edgier tone, one that seems depressingly plausible as tech companies continue to innovate and promise to change the world with their creations, whether it’s really for the better of humankind or not.

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Upload Review Amazon’s SciFi Tech Satire Is Fun But Familiar

Upload is anchored by a fine performance from Amell, who plays Nathan as a somewhat spoiled everyman who’s largely gotten by in life on his good looks and charm. That’s helped him land a girlfriend like Ingrid, but it’s also left him to desire more from life. That life involves developing an app with his business partner Jamie (Jordan Johnson-Hinds) that may or may not have played a role in the accident that put Nathan in a situation where he had to choose an uploaded afterlife or potential death.

It’s an intriguing setup that gives Upload an unexpected sense of mystery and supplements the story of a guy whose life was cut short but finds himself on a journey of self-discovery in a digital afterlife. Unfortunately, Upload can sometimes get distracted by all of its shiny baubles, wondrous tech, and biting satire aimed directly at tech and consumer culture. This results in episodes that are not only too long — each one clocks in at roughly 45 minutes — but often indulge in inessential digressions that keep the main story at bay in favor of gags about wonky tech, buggy AI, or the omnipresence of advertisements and in-app purchases in our increasingly online lives.

As if to counteract this tendency toward digression, Upload introduces Nora (Andy Allo), a friendly tech support specialist who guides Nathan through the emotional and logistic roller coaster of his upload process. Nora essentially works like The Good Place’s Janet, in that she can facilitate nearly any request made by a guest, but the difference is she’s a real flesh-and-blood human working long hours to keep uploaded dead people happy. Allo and Amell have workable chemistry, though the show moves too quickly in implying a potential romance between the two, particularly when so many unresolved issues with Ingrid feel more pressing and are actually more interesting to watch early on.

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The push-pull between Upload’s tech-world satire and attempts at more biting political and social commentary, and its everyman caught up in life-changing circumstances beyond his control/potential world-altering conspiracy can be compelling, but they do leave precious little room for meaningful introspection into how the show’s central concepts have fundamentally altered human life. In the end, Upload is a fun and potentially prescient comedy, but its single-minded fixation on tech too often results in an unfortunate sense of alienation from its otherwise human characters.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/upload-review-amazon-greg-daniels-robbie-amell/

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