Sunday, August 6, 2017

Handmaid's Tale season 1 (2017)

2017.08.06
Just finished watching season one. Read the book in the 80s, watched the movie in the 90s. I vaguely remember the book being OK, with a somewhat dissapointing ending, and the movie being unwatchable.

This tv series was better. They stretched it a bit, but it mostly held up. I remember things as the show went along. Other than the premise, not much of the original story was all that memorable. And even the premise is paper thin; if you are any kind of student of history and how power works, you know that you this kind of story in this short a timeline doesn't quite work that way. But there's the sci-fi premise of radical population decline, so that throws everything off.

This show feels like a prequel to Children of Men. At this point, there's still a little hope, there are still some viable mothers, still a few children. It feels like within a generation or two, we'll be in that other movie. It feels a bit pointless like why bother fighting this ridiculous theocracy, when the human populations is going to dwindle to nothing soon anyway.