THE PRISONER [2009]

The Village is still here, although it’s now much larger, and instead of a curfew there are nightclubs and impeccably clean restaurants. The giant white orb still patrols its borders. People are still referred to by numbers instead of names - and No. 2 is the character presiding over the Village, while No. 6 is the character determined to escape. But that’s where the similarities end. Despite the narrative complexity and character depth demanded by today’s discerning television viewers, this remake is so goddamn boring compared to its predecessor.

It certainly looks spectacular, as the framegrabs above indicate, and the reveal at the end isn’t the biggest letdown in the world (even if it does take the entire final episode to explain). I think that this version’s abandonment of the comic elements of the original are probably its biggest weaknesses here. The idea of a secret village in the middle of nowhere where everyone is referred to by number and weather balloons act as security systems is incredibly easy to mock, and the original deflected that camp aspect through incorporating satire and witty dialogue - as well as sticking to a formula which allowed the audience to slowly realize the utter impossibility of No. 6 escaping from the Village, so that all escape attempts made by the protagonist contained an undercurrent of hilarious dramatic irony. The remake, on the other hand, is a very straight-faced affair with Jim Caviezel looking bewildered and yelling a lot while Ian McKellen hides his emotional pain behind a smug exterior. And centering the mythology around No. 2’s emotional backstory rather than No. 6 or the Village as a whole seems like a mistake: building a 6-hour narrative around escape attempts and resistance against authority seems a lot more exciting than delving into the family dynamics of the man in charge.

Maybe I’m just exhausted with 21st-century diatribes against “the digital surveillance state” which attempt to create a mysterious aura around bad TV-static effects and evil corporations who behave and operate at a significant disconnect with the way the world actually works. Who knows? In any case, I may have tolerated this (and perhaps even enjoyed it) if its runtime were cut in half. As it stands it’s just a particularly beautiful piece of bland, vague notions.