Ridley Scott to direct 'Raised by Wolves', Sci-Fi drama series

[𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔈𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔥 𝔓𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯]

https://twitter.com/RaisedWolvesMAX/status/1299013835257532416

Guess I'm on an island because I really dug Raised By Wolves. I've seen six episodes and have no idea where it's really going. The world-building is phenomenal and Scott's set up first two episodes were superb. Surprised even shocked by the mixed reviews.

https://twitter.com/TheGregoryE/status/1299043057459838978

#RaisedByWolves is the first must-watch HBO Max original. It's basically what you wanted from Ridley Scott from Prometheus: extremely '70s sci-fi, intense horror, bizarre mysteries, a fresh mythology, an amazing cast... The less you know, the better. Do not miss.

https://twitter.com/azalben/status/1299013807570743297

Here to say that HBO Max's #RaisedByWolves is my new ~OBSESSION~ The last time I felt this awestruck and energized by a balls out sci-fi show was BSG!!! The lore, the twists, the bizarre android shit... fingers crossed they nail the finale!

https://twitter.com/megsokay/status/1299015081930428423

Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, HBO Max's Raised By Wolves: The Ridley Scott Absolutely Does Not Give a f**k What You Think Sci-fi Trilogy

https://twitter.com/misterpatches/status/1299068814454390789

https://twitter.com/misterpatches/status/1299069339518332936

[Nightmare Asylum]

Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, HBO Max's Raised By Wolves: The Ridley Scott Absolutely Does Not Give a f**k What You Think Sci-fi Trilogy

https://twitter.com/misterpatches/status/1299068814454390789

Sold.

[Kradan]

But I wanted da movie

[Nightmare Asylum]

But I wanted da movie

[Kradan]

[Ridlazz921]

I dont dare to read too much of the reviews. I want to be suprised.
But what i do have to say is that no matter how it turns out, i think its fantastic that good ol Wierd Ridley have returned.
It seams like this is a throwback to his early work, where it was more wierd and arthouse. He then became more commercial over the years.

I like him when he does both.
And we havent seen him done wierd in a while. I think Prometheus and Covenant he was retained, now it seams like he is unleashed.

[Ingwar]

Raised by Wolves feels like the logical next step in Ridley Scott's career. The Alien and Blade Runner director has returned to artificially intelligent characters in recent years with films like Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, so it follows that his first US TV directing gig would be about gradually deteriorating AI wrestling against their programming on a mysterious, far-flung world.

The HBO Max series, which releases its first three episodes on Thursday, September 3, was created by Prisoners scribe Aaron Guzikowski with Scott on board as executive producer. Scott also helmed the first two installments - setting the stage for a 10-part saga that feels at once new and familiar - before passing episode 3 onto his son Luke (who directed several supplemental short films for Blade Runner 2049, Alien: Covenant, and The Martian). This father-son handoff is fitting; Raised by Wolves centers on a pair of humanoid androids tasked with raising a new generation of human children, exploring the limits of their own humanity — and their own inhumanity — in the process,

The show's premise seems simple at first, though it plays its cards devilishly close to its chest. There aren't any spoilers in this review, though do look out for my detailed deep-dive once the show has officially premiered; there is a lot to get into, and each installment feels like it opens up new doors and new possibilities. The first episode takes what would ordinarily be a prologue in voiceover or opening text and spreads it across an entire hour, introducing us to a pair of androids simply named Mother (Amanda Collin) and Father (Abubakar Salim) who arrive on a distant planet sometime after the Earth becomes uninhabitable.

Despite the conflicting programming at their core, Mother and Father have a personable rapport and they share a common objective: birthing six human embryos on this distant world, seeding it with new life, and raising these six children to avoid the mistakes which led to humanity's implosion. The show is able to play coy with its specifics longer than most sci-fi stories of its ilk; after all, the only real exposition at first is what Mother and Father do and do not teach their kids (what information is or is not shared, and why, is an entertaining part of the mystery). All we seem to know for sure is this: the Earth was torn apart by religious zealotry, and a core belief of one major faction — the sun-worshipping Mithraic — involved stern opposition to androids raising human children.

Mother, Father, and their kids are, therefore, refugees of sorts. They arrived on a tiny spacecraft that now hangs off an inner ledge of one of this planet's many enormous holes (deep, unending caverns shot dizzyingly by Scott). We don't yet know who sent them here, but we know they weren't Earth's only survivors; somewhere, out in the universe, a ship known as The Ark carries a thousand Mithraic passengers to distant quadrants, and all it would take to contact The Ark is someone switching on Mother and Father's ship — should they be able to reach it.

The first episode is focused mostly on this makeshift interstellar family, while the second and third flesh out the backstories of two Mithraic characters in particular — Marcus (Travis Fimmel) and Sue (Niamh Algar) — in manners both delightful and surprising, positioning them as thematic mirrors to Mother and Father in ways best left unspoiled. The show is constantly twisting its screws, throwing new sci-fi concepts at the wall at breakneck speed, though they seem to stick for the most part. No genre element is introduced without the express purpose of exploring its characters and exacerbating their crises of identity, even if it takes a while to get a handle on what the premise actually is (the "who" and "why" of Earth's collapse is left frustratingly oblique, even when it seems like the central focus).

However, these specifics become a secondary concern when someone like Ridley Scott is at the helm. The opening scenes promise a wildly idiosyncratic story in the vein of Scott gleefully toying with his creations, a career-long instinct that appeared to come to Frankensteinian fruition in Alien: Covenant. Here, though, body horror takes a back seat, even though some elements undoubtedly carry over.

The main focus appears to be nature of the nuclear family — a familiar structure in the face of societal deterioration — from the ways it protects, to the ways in which it stifles. As much as the show is about characters coming physically undone (and about Scott's signature, milky android innards), it's also a story about white lies and betrayals; horrors that go hand-in-hand with emotional intimacy.

There's a real weight to everything that happens, but it wouldn't be a post-Prometheus Scott story if it weren't also incredibly fun to watch. The family's bland bodysuits and floppy, uniform hats feel winkingly retro-futuristic. (I sometimes wondered if the show was based on a series of decades old pulp sci-fi novels; to my delight, it's wholly original.) What makes the show especially enticing is Mother and Father themselves — especially Amanda Collin, who oscillates fearlessly between maternal and terrifying, in a performance that teeters on the edge of madness but never fails to be empathetic. The Scotts even shoot Mother the way they shoot this new planet: in one moment it's home, warm and welcoming. In the next, it's filmed in shadow, as untold dangers lurk within its hidden corners. (Fittingly, cinematographer Dariusz Wolski shoots the first two episodes before handing the camera over to his Alien: Covenant second unit director Ross Emery, who also shot a trio of Covenant shorts, thus keeping it all in the family).

To put it simply, Raised by Wolves is peak Ridley Scott. Though what appears to separate it from his android predecessors (Alien, Blade Runner, and his Alien prequels) is something all too fitting for a show coming out in 2020. Where the aforementioned works all featured androids in somewhat functioning human societies — even those taking place on distant worlds — Raised by Wolves continues this exploration amidst an ever-shifting status quo, in which any semblance of societal function seems like a luxury of the past. Humanity's remnants exist in the radioactive afterglow of a world torn apart by extreme, irreconcilable convictions. So rather than a story of androids figuring out how they fit into an ostensibly normal world, the show pushes this familiar premise into unfamiliar territory, as technological beings are forced to reckon not only with what humanity is, but what it once was — the worst parts of it, which undoubtedly led to its downfall.

In addition to protective and parental instincts, this appetite for destruction, and penchant for clutching tightly to one's beliefs, is as much a part of the programming Mother and Father need to reckon with. And so, Raised by Wolves holds a terrifying amount of relevance — at least initially, though it seems poised to keep up its momentum.

Verdict
With Raised by Wolves, legendary director Ridley Scott expands on his android explorations from films like Alien and Blade Runner (and more recently, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant) before handing the reins to his son Luke for episode 3. The atmosphere in these premiere episodes veers between welcoming and dangerous, as androids named "Mother" and "Father" both follow and fight their programming to raise human children on a distant planet, far from the religious zealotry that destroyed the Earth — forces which may not be far behind. It's a show that throws concept after concept at the wall, though in Scott's seasoned hands, the vast majority of them stick, setting the stage for one of the most interesting sci-fi shows in years.

9/10

https://www.ign.com/articles/raised-by-wolves-review-hbo-max-spoiler-free

[Stolen]

The series doesn't seem to appeal to everyone, but that's no surprise.
For science fiction fans like us, the promises are there!

HBO Max's Raised by Wolves is Original Sci-Fi at Its Most Polarizing

"Raised by Wolves" is the type of sci-fi project that deserves some respect for its ambition alone—whatever you feel from it, you have to admire its full commitment to its Biblical proportions, and the way that it uses its androids and killers to tell a story about faith and parenting. Ridley Scott directed the first two episodes of the series, and using his name as part of the marketing is a fair move (even if it was created by Aaron Guzikowski, who wrote "Prisoners.") This space oddity is very much of Scott's more exploratory, and out-there stories, like settling into Scott's "Prometheus" for the first time. And like that film, "Raised by Wolves" could inspire a lot of conversation, and it just as similarly could inspire people to write it off.

There is a lot going on in this story, as you might have been able to guess. It's a series that asks a lot from the viewer, in part because its parallel stories of parenting feel like they're part of a large prologue for the first two episodes. The show as a whole doesn't really start to click by episode three (the first three episodes of the series will be released on the debut date of September 3). For all of the world-building that it does, and the way it tinkers with android character-building, "Raised by Wolves" struggles to fully grab you aside from getting you acclimated to its dry, heady idea of the future.

That's the other major problem that plagues "Raised by Wolves"—you can see all the grandiose ideas that are unfolding in the series, especially anything related to faith, and the way that planting a seed of doubt in someone's mind can be so powerful. But the intellectual exploration of this story, unfolding in front of such a murky backdrop that could easily be called hardcore sci-fi, is incredibly cold. It tries to be emotional with its performances, especially as Collin and Salim mix flat line delivery with sensitivity, expressing in stiff scenes their anxieties about parents. But then there's the two humans, Marcus and Sue, and their story is even less emotionally engaging. "Raised by Wolves" feels more like reading a list of its themes instead of feeling for the characters who enact them.

The later episodes (and there will be no spoilers) indicate that there is some strong plotting to this story ahead, even if you're not entirely sure where it could end up. I wouldn't want to watch a movie like Ridley Scott's "Prometheus" only half-way through, and that's kind of the case with this series that starts to make bigger promises by episodes four and five (press was only provided six episodes). There's a backstory with Mother that might be the best flashback the series has so far, and yet there's no sense that it's going to lead to anything revelatory outside of the plot.

Watching "Raised by Wolves," you feel a certain gratitude that someone can still make sci-fi projects like this, that creatives can keep tinkering with our thoughts of the future while reflecting modern themes back at us. Even if you're more on the fence about whether it all works—or rather, whether it gets you at an emotional level—it's certainly not going to provide you with typical sci-fi imagery. "Raised by Wolves" is original sci-fi at its most polarizing, and that factor seems to be why it even exists.

Rogerebert.com

[𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔈𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔥 𝔓𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯]

More footage of war-ravaged Earth with a few new shots:

https://twitter.com/RaisedWolvesMAX/status/1299368644753805312

[Ridlazz921]

Interesting.
I find "The new world" to have a lot of Moebius vibes. While earth seams inspired by a lot of Enki Bilal.

The adroids also reminds me of this work

[RidleyScott99]

Happy for MOTHER and especially Ridley Scott. MOTHER is The Greatest Character since DAVID

[Ingwar]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4lqbm_JE-s

[𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔈𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔥 𝔓𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯]

Reviewer for the Washington Post:

I'm only on the third screener for HBO Max's upcoming #RaisedByWolves, but it's easily the weirdest f**king thing I've seen since Twin Peaks: The Return and some of the most hardcore sci-fi I've ever seen on TV. Every scene looks like a classic sci-fi paperback cover.

https://twitter.com/tomandlorenzo/status/1299454625586778113

[Nightmare Asylum]

Look, you mention Twin Peaks, I drop everything and pay attention to what you're saying.

[𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔈𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔥 𝔓𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯]

Heard Riddles bought himself a weirding module from David Lynch.