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13th June 2022
01:59pm BST

Okay, we'll get the good stuff out of the way first. It won't take long...
Hot off the release of Top Gun Maverick, it is clear that director Joseph Kosinski has a remarkable eye for putting his movies together. Everything looks and feels slick and clinical, and he draws some great performances out of Teller and Smollett (not so much Hemsworth, who is obviously up to no good from frame one).
Unfortunately, Kosinski is undercut by a script by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who made a name for themselves with OTT screenplays for Deadpool and Zombieland. But this script, based on the acclaimed short story Escape From Spiderhead by award-winning author George Saunders, needed a softer touch.
There were potentially some very interesting places to go with this, from the overwhelming power and influence that big pharma has over the world, to the sub-human treatment incarcerated people might find themselves exposed to, not to mention just a straight-forward trick-of-the-mind thriller where nothing anyone has seen or heard or felt can actually be trusted, because maybe it was just the drugs...?
But nope. Instead, the movie's biggest mystery is... where is all the mystery??
Even the worst episodes of Black Mirror still managed to pull off some kind of a decent rug pull. Spiderhead's big "reveal" is that with a great director, great cast, great plot idea, all that great stuff... you can still end up with kind of a dud.
Spiderhead is available to watch on Netflix from Friday, 17 June.
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