Worth: $10.00
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Cast:
Iain Glen, Emily Hampshire, Martin Compston, Mark Addy, Owen Teale, Calvin Demba
Intro:
… an ocean of potential here that goes completely untapped and unexplored.
A slow-opening mystery box of a series, The Rig seldom offers anything new by way of story or premise. Amazon Studios’ latest addition to its streaming line up is a dip in the pool of Lovecraftian mythos that promises unearthly delights but fails to deliver.
During the first three episodes, The Rig struggles to keep a hold of the audience’s attention. The show is unable to keep a foothold in both the dramatic and the horrific, often delivering on neither, with the threat of what lurks in the deep and wet darkness holding our gaze by a thread.
Following a number of unexplained tremors, the members of a remote oil rig situated off the coast of Scotland find themselves beset by an ominous fog; bringing with it darkness, unexplained ash and chaos, the crew struggle to make sense of the phenomena whilst cut off from the outside world.
Creator David Macpherson reaches into a deep bag of tropes, cliches and well-worn archetypes, and rather than reshaping, remodelling and re-layering what has already come before, we’re instead presented with the same horror chess pieces that are merely waiting to be knocked off the board.
We’ve seen these players before – the warm yet decisive leader who refuses to leave any crew behind (Iain Glen), the hothead turned harbinger of doom (Calvin Demba), the idealistic corporate suit placed merely to meet the company quota (Emily Hampshire). Not only have we seen these characters before, with far more substance and depth, but often in stories far more memorable.
While it is always difficult to make a full judgment having only seen the first three episodes, it’s even more difficult to want to continue on, even with the barely enticing mystery hanging over the series.
Macpherson leans hard on the enigma of the entity, using the surrounding chaos to do the dramatic heavy lifting, but he adds so little else that it is difficult to care about anyone else involved. Even more perplexing is the creator’s penchant for drawing inspiration from similar source material – The Thing, Event Horizon, The Mist, Annihilation, all great and robust stories in their own right – and coming away with something so flat. It’s clear the shine of those aforementioned properties got the better of Macpherson, and the real meat – the paranoia, the cosmic insanity, the burrowing sense of dread, the apocalyptic brutality – has been left on the floor, forgotten or completely misunderstood.
Based almost solely on what could have been, The Rig is a disappointment. There’s an ocean of potential here that goes completely untapped and unexplored. The characters barely register, and the derivative story uses far too much of its screen time replicating tales we have seen told before, and more effectively. One can only hope that this situation changes, and that the final three episodes offer a complete narrative shift – one where the proceedings kick into high gear. However, going by the quality and hollowness of the storytelling thus far, don’t hold your breath.