(courtesy IMP Awards)
If you’ve much streaming content over the last ten years, you will be well and truly acquainted with the fact that the world is coming to a messy and inglorious end.
Well, maybe not today, or tomorrow even, but imminently in some way, shape or form, and at the hands of some agent of diabolical change, the exact nature of which varies though the intent does not – to destroy, enslave or take over our beleaguered planet for their own ends.
By far the most popular choice for world-ending nasties, and sorry zombies, zeigeisty though you are, that’s not you, is an alien invasion where extraterrestrials in search of a new home or resources or a compliant slave population, descend on Earth, surreptitiously or not, and create apocalyptic havoc.
Depending on where the show or movie is made, humanity either inspirationally fights back with sticks and stones or viral computer code trumping light-years-ahead tech, or we fold and die but not before a damn good story is told.
It’s hard to say in the Argentine series, The Eternaut (El Eternauta), based on the 1950s serialised comic strip of the same name by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López and adapted for television by Bruno Stagnaro, which way things will go.
The first season of six tautly-told episodes, which balance action and ruminative humanity to an evocatively flawless degree, veers between people banding together to strike back and a sense of resignation that this terrible thing has happened and we have to make the most of it.
In the beginning of course, no one really knows what’s going on.
One casual, relaxed summer evening, out of nowhere, a wafty snow starts falling to the ground; while that alone is a cause for concern, what follows is far worse as people out in the open begin dying near instantly, collapsing on the street in their thousands while those safely indoors watch on in horror.
It’s not immediately apparent that it’s the snow killing people but events soon prove that to be the case, and the survivors with whom we’re embedded – close friends who gather weekly for a card game and are mostly all together when the world unexpectedly starts to come to an end – quickly come to understand that whatever is happening, it’s changing their lives forever.
The heartbeart of The Eternaut is Juan Salvo (Ricardo Darín) who keeps his head (one mysteriously filled with unexplained visions of the past and future) when many others don’t and who sets off from the relative safety of the home of his friends, Alfredo Favalli (“Tano”)and Ana (César Troncoso abd Andrea Pietra respectively) to find his ex-wife Elena (Carla Peterson) and daughter Clara (More Fisz).
It’s pretty much a suicide mission if the jerry-rigged outfit Juan is clad in fails – a gas mask and waterproof clothing give him sufficient protection to navigate the snow-strewn, eerily silent streets full of bodies and crashed cars – but he ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- manages to find Elena only to discover that Clara is out there somewhere in a world rapidly becoming inimical to human life and shedding community-minded vestiges of civilisation frighteningly fast.
What is most entrancing, and emotionally chilling, about The Eternaut is that the action, both intensely visceral and hauntingly quiet, unfolds in real time.
While many end-of-the-world rush to get us to the bit where humanity is well and truly up sh*t creek, The Eternaut, much like Fear the Walking Dead which let the mounting terror of the zombie apocalypse play out in real time, takes its time setting up the hell which is to come by taking us through the understandably confusing period where no one knows what’s going on except that it’s BAD.
It reflects very much how real people would react, moving from fear and confusion to nascent, somewhat-informed understanding through to an appreciation of just how terrible things are, and it means that when all the alien baddies start to make their violently ugly or eerily mind-controlling presence known, that you are learning things pretty much at the same rate and time as the thousands of survivors.
This commitment to real time storytelling lends an emotional muscularity to events that could simply end up coming across as popcorn blockbuster-ism and ensures we have time to not only get to know the characters but to place ourselves in their shoes and identify with their very real, very human reactions.
There is, of course, the very real issue of deadly snow, which feels very Stephen King-ish, and the aliens who ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- kill a ton of people off before cerebrally enslaving the survivors, but at the end of the harrowing day what really matters is the existential dread of having your life taken out from under you.
You have to adapt incredibly fast to circumstances which changes on a daily and sometimes hourly basis, and while human beings are incredibly resilient and adaptive, that kind of fast, hyper-vigilant emotional and physical manoeuvring exerts a significant toll.
Because its willing to take its narrative time, The Eternaut has plenty of time to explore how various people react and how a noble response by one person can be matched by a self-interested survivalist mentality by another, and how at some point, these two have to find some sort of messy, awkward accommodation if anyone if going to survive the alien invasion horrors to come.
It would be all too easy for a show like The Eternaut, happily renewed for a second season (where there are questions needing answering), to lose itself in overly thoughtful existential naval gazing or action that exists purely to make things happen, but it maintains the balance between the two superlatively well, offering up an end-of-the-world tale that has the requisite shock and awe of strange and advanced alien beings treating the earth like any colonial invader would, but which takes the time to sit with the humanity at the heart of the story.
It’s an act of narrative restraint which gifts these six beautifully wrought and emotionally intense episodes with some meaning and character identification and which means that the show hits you in the heart as much as it shocks you with its apocalyptic doom and gloom.
The Eternaut streams on Netflix.