Science fiction has always been a difficult genre in film and series: the more exotic and visionary the look into the future, the more complicated it is to serve up the strangeness of the concepts in an easily digestible way in storytelling. In many of these stories, the future is staged primarily as a high-tech backdrop to their plot, rather than as a coherent world building with radically bizarre ideas.
When Ridley Scott sets off as a producer towards the distant future with “Raised By Wolves”, experienced through numerous science fiction excursions in the “Alien” series and “Blade Runner”, the expectations are correspondingly high. And lo and behold, the first episodes offer a fascinating series experience with excellently presented exposition: with a few strokes and comparatively manageable effort, a completely foreign world is drawn. Two cyborgs land on an uninhabited planet with exotic fauna, create a group of children from test tubes and raise them far away from all human influences. At least until the offspring gradually dies away – except for a seemingly chosen boy who seems destined for greater things.
Incidentally, we learn more and more about the reason for the flight: A murderous conflict runs through the galaxy, fought between strict believers in God and radical atheists, culminating in a devastating war fought with killer robots, whose fundamentalist force tears entire worlds into the abyss. The plot in the first episodes of the first season rushes forward in a wonderfully brisk manner, the outlined future unfolds before us as unpredictably unfamiliar. When more fugitives land on the planet and import the deadly confrontation into the supposedly rugged paradise, we are already deeply immersed in a different mythology. Loyalty and vocation, vision and delusion, civilizational hara-kiri and human hubris are the issues here – tonally in the strangely coherent field of tension between claim, pulp and camp.
But between the big ideas and the outrageous plot twists, especially towards the end of the first season, “Raised By Wolves” remains difficult to grasp. With a sense for bizarre concepts that repeatedly show how alien this distant future is to us, the series leads into unusually dry narrative terrain. In a series landscape full of spectacle, this seems like a welcome change. But with the tendency – generally found in a certain type of US series – never to solve central puzzles, but to create puzzle piece after puzzle piece that may never fully come together, “Raised By Wolves” strains the patience of the audience.
The series cannot really be recommended without reservation, even with season two; “Raised By Wolves” falls too far from the grid of what we are used to in series and science fiction. Anyone who gets involved in this serial exoticism and looks behind the sometimes pretentious facade will be rewarded with one of the most unique and unusual series of recent years, despite a few dramaturgical missteps.
To be seen on RTL+.
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