Just as the global pandemic seemed to profoundly accelerate the demise of movies and theatergoing—something we all cynically assumed would happen, but hell, not that fast! Not so soon! culturally, our internal clocks all have an impending sense of doom that seems to be ticking faster than ever. Climate change is something we presume will destroy our lives eventually, but globally, it’s been unnerving to watch raging forest fires in Australia that appear apocalyptic, or more recently, if you’re a New Yorker, experience firsthand alarming smoke and air quality pollution that looks like it’s been shot by Roger Deakins on the set of “Blade Runner 2049.” Intentional timed or not, this is where Steven Soderbergh and writer Kurt Anderson are coming from with their surprise new sci-fi-ish satirical series, “Command Z” (the Apple key command for “undo,” and specifically the computer power to negate a mistake; the serious was not officially announced until three days prior to release, and not for nothing, we were the only ones that reported about it months ago in advance).
At about 90 minutes in length, chopped into eight episodes of various lengths and only available on Soderbergh’s website, is “Command Z” a movie, a TV show, or a web series? As the series itself might suggest, there’s no point in wasting time with pedestrian questions like that; we have more urgent matters to attend to.
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The undo keystroke of “Command Z” might be, in practical terms, to reverse the effects of various global catastrophes that will undoubtedly fuck our world in a few centur—err, decades. But the true undo that Soderbergh and Anderson are getting at— the former the director, the latter the creator and chief writer of the piece—is that if we could undo anything in the year 2023, it might be best to undo ourselves, culture, society, civilization, and humanity. Like erosion, we’re on a slow-motion collision with doom that we can all see, but clearly, we’re all too busy to really do anything about it. The Cliff Notes version is; maybe it’s “Black Mirror,” but less English and more minimalist and small scale (and arguably more entertaining than the U.K. series, which is thematically prescient and interesting but has suffered dramatically from diminishing results in recent years).
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The premise of “Command Z” is that sometime in the near future, a long-dead A.I. billionaire, Kerning Fealty (Michael Cera), a forward-thinking Elon Musk-like tech figure who is just as narcissistic and megalomaniacal, tasks his employees with a “historic” mission to travel back in time to revise history and save the world.
Announcing his plans to his employees, who wear Hazmat suits to work and live in different sections of a planet that are walled-off by former cities that are now underwater, Fealty determines 2023 as the critical inflection and turning point of civilization. Using lo-fi, lo-tech technology—a dubious drinking concoction, some janky MRI headgear, and a modified washing machine—Fealty has created a way for his employees to travel back in time into the consciousness of various key people in 2023 and compel them to make critical decisions to reverse the course of Earth’s history.
In a dingy, dark, and dank room, the A.I. Fealty, just a disembodied head but still sentient and just as sarcastic, self-amused, and self-absorbed, sends his three employees, the young and optimistic Jamie (J.J. Maley), the deeply cynical Emma (stand-up comedian Chloe Radcliffe, who also doubles as one of the series’ writers) and the detached and apathetic Sam (Roy Wood Jr. who also writes at least one episode) ona 10-day top secret mission to various time travel scenarios.
But don’t picture “Back To The Future” like physical travel and trying to avoid your doppelganger, as mentioned, projecting this future doom before his demise, Fealty—who is a bit of a contextual exposition dump machine but an amusing one— and his physicists gamed this scenario out years ago. Thanks to their scientific creations and achievements: an artificial space-time wormhole, hand sanitizer used during the pandemic, nano-bots in the bloodstream, and a lot of other mumbo jumbo jargon, Fealty’s people can jump back in time into the interior consciousness of people and help manipulate key stakeholders—politicians, tech bros, cultural titans—of the world at the time.
The idea (hahaha, in retrospect) is to manipulate the empathy of wealthy white billionaires and industrialists who control the world via the people they love. In scenarios that look a little inspired by Spike Jonze’s “Being John Malkovich” consciousness portal traveling, each of these three various employees jumps back into the mind and soul of someone hoping to change the mind of a 2023 influencer (someone who irrevocably changed the world). It’s essentially moral empathy whispering, and it works as well as you might guess on rich, white, privileged assholes.
In one scenario, Sam inhabits the consciousness of Benny, the cute dog of Kohlberg Pryce (Liev Schreiber), a depraved Wall Street asshole, immorally stripping the value of whatever he can for gain. In this wacky scenario, the dog can talk, influence, and tell Pryce he wishes he could be a better human being. This phenomenal encounter does have significant ramifications, but it’s never the ones that Fealty and his team have calculated and computed for. Despite all the billions of algorithms and analyses, the human what-if factor of it all always veers the outcome off course or fails altogether.
Slight, modest, and yet amusing, “Command Z” is a minor work but an entertaining one; the scale and setting of the series—mostly just one room where the projected image of Michael Cera’s floating head talks to three people in blue jumpsuits—really doesn’t up your expectations too much.
Self-financed and therefore as humbly rendered as the aforementioned paragraph suggests, Soderbergh has always been a filmmaker lacking in vanity. That is to say, cinematically, while interesting as it can be in its limited spaces, cinema isn’t really the point. Kurt Anderson’s clever, quippy, witty, and droll cultural send-up and satire of our current cultural state is, and that’s really the concern here.
Soderbergh’s “hell yes” to this project—his oft-repeated phrase on whether to say yes to a project or not, seems to simply suggest: this is a simple, straightforward, crafty, and cunning idea of biting cultural commentary that I can serve and serve sustainably (i.e., without a ton of studio capital).
And that’s really it. “Command Z” will not change the world, or the creative culture, and screenwriters the world over arguably need to find a new supervillain other than the vainglorious asshole tech-bro billionaire whose unchecked, unchallenged hubris and unlimited wealth and power will ruin things for the rest of us. Yet, while as quickly as this is becoming cliché, you only need to look as far as what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter at this very moment, day to day, to see it as a microcosm of what some bigger, richer, more egotistical, self-inflated asshole will do in the future that’s 10x worse for all of civilization.
In this regard, Soderbergh does tee up Anderson’s material well. Moreover, the stroke of casting someone like Michael Cera as Fealty is genius, and the piece serves as an excellent showcase for underseen, underserved talent like Wood Jr., Maley, and especially Chloe Radcliffe, who appears to be the big discovery of the series.
Anderson’s also not saying anything most of us don’t already know. We’re all going to watch in slow horror as our society collapses in front of us in a meme-y “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this!” ala “I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson” way. Still in his cultural savvy and astute, New York Times meets McSweeney’s meets Spy way, Anderson and Soderbergh craft a diverting, “The world seems truly f*cked, doesn’t it?” rhetorical question. Yes, indeed, it does. [B]
Note: When you purchase access to COMMAND Z, all proceeds will be donated to Children’s Aid and Boston University Center for Antiracist Research.