Much more than just another art-book, Simon Stalenhag’s TALES FROM THE LOOP delivers a compendium of illustrated fiction about mysterious technology, centred on various industrial-scale science projects at a particle accelerator hidden under the Swedish countryside.
This fascinating mix of drawings and paintings with nostalgic anecdotes is the stuff of a childhood growing up within sci-fi dreams about big robots, and levitating vehicles, as mere backdrops to several uncanny events and family legends. An unlikely source, The Loop was adapted as eight episodes for a TV series created by Nathaniel Halpern.
Despite some thoroughly modern concerns, the melancholy spirit of genre-giant Ray Bradbury seems to haunt alternate-history dreamscapes for this competently Americanised show, its rural settings switched to Ohio, but decidedly elegiac tones of narrative maintain its lost futurism with quaintly styled 1970s era decor.
Mark Romanek directs first episode LOOP, where time-slip discovery intros the core SF theme, while British stars Rebecca Hall and Jonathan Pryce provide a semblance of science-team rationality when the curiosity of young brothers Cole and Jakob find weird examples of experimental failures in abandoned but never forgotten hardware. Loss and grief emerge from Loop tales without much chance or expectation of happy endings. Jane Alexander heads the support cast with an increasingly matriarchal role in the extended family.
Flashback episode ENEMIES, directed by Ti West, offers key plotline material with a misadventure on robot-monster-island, before Jodie Foster’s season finale HOME, that benefits from better and more intriguing storytelling techniques, and includes a cameo/ subgenre in-joke by cult-auteur Shane Carruth, who observes that a life-time is merely “blink of an eye” in duration for this lonely milieu of retro visions, complete with evocative music by Philip Glass.
There’s also table-top games, and Russo brothers’ movie version The Electric State (due next year), for quest adventure starring the now ubiquitous Millie Bobby Brown.
