The Prisoner Reboot Takes Sci-Fi Out of Spy-Fi

The Prisoner Reboot Takes Sci-Fi Out of Spy-Fi


Four decades after The Prisoner kissed off the ’60s with a cerebral hit of paranoia, AMC and ITV’s reboot of the influential spy-fi series has finally arrived to upgrade the panopticon. But does it have bleeding-edge lenses? The short answer is no.
See also:

R.I.P. Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner’s Television Visionary

The Prisoner Reboots the Panopticon for 21st Century

Slipstreaming between Africa and New York and stripped almost entirely of humor and heart, the new Prisoner, which airs in six parts Sunday through Tuesday on AMC, is too heavy on domestic melodrama and too light on sci-fi possibility. Rather than taking its contemporary obsessions about love in the time of technology to the outer limits, director Nick Hurran and producer Trevor Hopkins have played it safe.

What gets lost in the remake’s dark dissection of human relationships complicated by ubiquitous surveillance and callous commodification is, simply put, ambition. And whether it’s too many love triangles, too much mood music or too obvious subplots — all complicated by the prodigious impact of its source material — the new iteration is too light on the spirited experimentation of its predecessor to stand out from the growing crowd of Prisoner disciples like Twin Peaks, The Matrix, Lost and more.

But if you’re a fan of heavy drama sprinkled with slight sci-fi, Hurran and Hopkins’ reboot fits in fine with the usual speculative TV suspects like Lost and Heroes. Just don’t come expecting a next-gen experience. The 2009 model of The Prisoner is merely a compression of its parent narrative — the same episodes and conceits distilled into six slow-motion episodes — albeit flavored lightly with a dash of mad science and sinister post-9/11 intrigue.

It still tastes like chicken.

(Spoiler alert: Plot points follow.)

The new Number Six, played by Jim Caviezel, is marooned in a dystopian Village in the 2009 remake of The Prisoner.All images courtesy AMC

Of course, everything you’ve read so far has been written by a loyal disciple of the late, great Patrick McGoohan’s original The Prisoner.
Q&As:

Sir Ian McKellen Takes On The Prisoner’s Number One Tormenter

Can Jim Caviezel Fill Patrick McGoohan’s Prisoner Shoes?

McGoohan’s ambitious, metafictional original series blew my mind, just as it did for everyone from The Beatles to comics brainiac Grant Morrison. And so, given the four decades since The Prisoner’s controversial finale “Fall Out” aired, I figured that whoever decided to mess with the show’s legacy would take some risks with the material.

But instead, like the desert mirage of twin New York towers the new Number Six follows to the Village, the iconography and sci-fi of the new Prisoner has already been thoroughly circulated in pop culture for years. In fact, it’s fair to say that the original took far more chances than its more humorless offspring. And that’s a shame.

That said, those unfamiliar with the former’s multicolored cultural whimsy and two-toned political subversion will probably feel at home with Hurran and Hopkins’ vision, filmed in desolate Namibia and seaside South Africa.
Ian McKellen stars

Ian McKellen brings heft to his portrayal of Number Two in the new The Prisoner.

Sir Ian McKellen’s legendary subtlety suits the tormentor Number Two like a spiked glove. As Number Six, the gifted Jim Caviezel brings a hefty dose of wide-eyed rebellion and tender confusion. Both fit in fine with our new-millennial method acting, where television shows like Battlestar Galactica, Lost and others get lost in character studies that comfort viewers rather than fractal narratives that challenge them.
Praise for The Prisoner:
There are but a few Grand Lions still standing, and any opportunity to see master thespians like Christopher Plummer, Albert Finney or Ian McKellen is an occasion worth relishing. Foremost among this theater-trained generation is McKellen, who injects The Prisoner with requisite sinister elegance in his role as Village mastermind Number Two.

Whether he’s playing mind games with sibling shrinks, tottering down the hallway with a breakfast tray for his mysteriously ailing wife, gently taunting the hapless Number Six or extolling the merits of civilian contentment, McKellen transforms somewhat generic material into a master class in villainous eloquence.

The Prisoner also deserves credit for its epic-scale cinematography. Shooting in sun-baked Namibia and South Africa, director of photography Florian Hoffmeister gets across the compound’s splendid isolation with unusually evocative desert vistas and underscores McKellen’s grandeur with handsome shots of the perpetually white-suited overseer at his palatial headquarters.

The town’s eerie architecture far exceeds typical TV fare. Production designer Michael Pickwoad has created a cookie-cutter collection of post-modern triangular houses that manages to appear simultaneously familiar and alien.

AMC’s Prisoner may fall short of the original, but as a basic cable offering, the reboot surpasses anything else available on Sunday night’s prime time lineup. —Hugh Hart

Like those two shows, The Prisoner has plenty of plot points that seem like they were positioned in a haze of cute obfuscation. Whereas the original series’ Number Two was eventually retired each episode like South Park’s Kenny, McKellen’s version now has a drugged wife and sexually troubled son, who, fine actors both, take up too much screen time with too much Douglas Sirk melodrama.

Caviezel’s Number Six is troubled by unnecessary baggage, including two love interests who also function as psychological guinea pigs. It’s a marked divergence from the late, great McGoohan’s legendary character, which eschewed any kind of overly romantic attachment in favor of a dogged pursuit of Number One, who turned out to be more familiar than England expected.

Each of the new version’s six episodes is thematically based on one from McGoohan’s original. Like its predecessor of the same name, the opener “Arrival,” which airs Sunday, is a relatively straightforward affair introducing Caviezel to The Village after he finds a near-dead old man wearing McGoohan’s piped sport-coat in the desert.

Episode 2, “Harmony,” riffs off The Prisoner’s Western tangent “Living in Harmony” to illuminate the battle lines of The Village’s groupthink dystopia, while Episode 3, “Anvil,” builds on the former “Hammer Into Anvil” to illustrate the violent tendencies hiding behind panoptic surveillance.

“Anvil” and Episode 4 (”Darling”) are where Hurran and Hopkins’ remake begins to sag, mostly because of bizarre love triangles. While the original episode “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling” found Number Six’s mind transferred to the body of another man — actor Nigel Stock, to be exact, who was covering for McGoohan while he was away shooting Ice Station Zebra — viewers of the reboot are treated to multiple love interests for Number Six conjured up by the show’s futuristic mating tech called “blink match.” It probably took about an eye-blink to decide that adding love interests would be a safe move for contemporary viewers, but “Anvil” and “Darling” are the least satisfying of the reboot’s episodes.

Things heat up in Episode 5, “Schizoid,” which — like its inspiration “The Schizoid Man” (viewable above), one of the weirdest episodes television has ever produced — involves multiple versions of Number Six at war with reality.

To set itself apart, the new Prisoner expands the doubling to Number Two, giving McKellen the chance to stop being such a bastard. But even though “Fall Out” — represented here by Episode 6, “Checkmate,” also a nod to McGoohan’s episode of the same name — decided to humanize Number Two in the end, the transformation is staunched in the reboot. McKellen’s Number Two spends much of the entire series pontificating about the lack of absolute evil or innocence, so when his turn to transform finally arrives it finds that it has been there all the time.

And when it is Caviezel’s turn to transform? Well, if you’ve seen the original, you know what to expect. If you haven’t, given the intensified (I would say lazy) moral ambiguity of current sci-fi television, you’ve seen it all before.

Which, in the final analysis, is precisely the problem with the new version of The Prisoner. Viewers have seen its tropes and traps already, whether in the superior original series or similarly minded dramatic exercises of TV and film. There is nothing new under the reboot’s African sun.

It is great to see McGoohan’s influential material finally enter the pop-culture mash machine. And Hurran is indeed a master of atmosphere, as much as Caviezel and McKellen are captivating thespians. But The Prisoner forever changed television by creatively depersonalizing humanity in pursuit of its politicization.

The new version has achieved the opposite: It has too casually depoliticized The Village, and human good and evil, in the pursuit of personalized television. In the translation, what got lost is ambition in the service of possibility.

WIRED Good talent; genetic engineering gone wrong; mind-melting drugs; Rover 2.0.

TIRED Slow, strained acting and writing; next to no action; little risk-taking; too little sci-fi; no McGoohan.

Rating:

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See also:

* The Prisoner: An All-Star Appreciation
* R.I.P. Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner’s TV Visionary
* Q&A: Can Jim Caviezel Fill Patrick McGoohan’s Prisoner Shoes?
* Q&A: Sir Ian McKellen Takes On The Prisoner’s Number One Tormenter
* The Prisoner Reboots the Panopticon for 21st Century
* The Prisoner’s Sonic Shadow Looms Large
* The Prisoner Inspires Dhani Harrison’s Thenewno2 Experiment