This formidable co-production was at all times going to throw down the gauntlet for large-scale, special-effects theatre: the right way to adapt Philip Ok Dick’s fast-paced, futuristic crime thriller for the stage and distinguish it from the Hollywood sci-fi motion movie with Tom Cruise? If any director was certified to provide it a go, it was Max Webster, who made such a splash with Lifetime of Pi.
This feminine-led model begins with a lecture by Dame Julia Anderton (Jodie McNee), creator of the pre-crime system, which lays out Dick’s philosophical and moral arguments round free will. It’s 2050 and state surveillance has been prolonged into the human mind, with a chip implanted into residents to observe transgressive ideas. We comply with Julia’s fugitive sleuthing when her personal system identifies her as a future assassin and he or she goes on the run.
There’s chutzpah within the endeavour however it is a unusually lifeless creation – a zombie hybrid of movie and stage. David Haig’s script has an undercooked plot crammed with anaemic twists, whereas each the motion and tempo want finessing.
A minimum of the optics are there, in abundance. The set is a vortex of sound and light-weight, filled with kinetic power because it shifts, lights up and yields futuristic vehicles, trains and AI holograms. Cityscapes bearing shades of Blade Runner (that different Dick story-turned-film) are projected on to the stage, and armed law enforcement officials seem like figures out of The Matrix, though they’re unusually inefficient at catching anybody.
However this visible motion exists in lieu of narrative propulsion. Some battle scenes are wood and the stress so mandatory for an motion drama of this sort is missing. You merely don’t really feel the jeopardy in it. The precogs should not almost as creepily haunting as Samantha Morton’s weak, wobbling movie counterpart, nor drawn with any consideration to element.
The motion itself appears too quick, with many transferring components on stage and the dialogue so hasty that typically it’s onerous to catch. McNee provides an environment friendly, virtually Time Lord-like efficiency, however there may be not a lot scope to the character, whereas her husband George (Nick Fletcher) stays a cypher. Their marital arguments happen on the transfer and appear tacked on.
Haig has clearly performed his analysis, nonetheless. Dick’s twin sister, who died as a child and was seen as one thing of a “phantom twin” in his work, may be seen in Julia’s murdered twin sister right here whose dying results in the creation of her pre-crime system. Dick’s questions round determinism, civic freedom and the bounds of machine pondering are right here too, as is Anderton’s double-pull between saving her invention and seeing its failings uncovered. However these concepts should not a lot performed out as talked out and none of it snags emotionally or accommodates sufficient dramatic impression.
A number of quiet moments, such because the scene through which Julia recounts her sister’s homicide, deliver glimmers of depth. There are wry mentions of our world, together with a Covid vaccine joke and a point out of a “retro” Apple watch together with some transient flecks of humour within the testy relationship between Julia and her AI voice companion, David (Tanvi Virmani), though the risk by Julia to strip David’s settings again to a primary Alexa or Siri mannequin is repeated.
The manufacturing is finally overwhelmed by its personal optics, the 3D set unmatched by its hole 2D drama.
