In Netflix’s Spiderhead, Deadpool’s writing team tackles somber, serious sci-fi
Psychology studies are riddled with past experiments that read like dystopian science fiction. Take the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, in which a group of volunteers were divided into “guards” and “prisoners” in an attempt to discern how social roles influence behavior. The experiment was called off after six days due to the nightmarish results. With that context in mind, the setup for Netflix’sSpiderhead doesn’t seem all that outlandish, apart from the high-tech island prison that looks like a modernist art museum.
Deadpool and Zombieland seriesscreenwriting duo Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick based the film on George Saunders’ 2010 short story “Escape from Spiderhead,” in which a prisoner named Jeff (played in the movie by Miles Teller) is subjected to a series of pharmaceutical trials with drugs that manipulate his emotions and actions, especially toward other prisoners who are also being dosed. The short story is something of a thought experiment, toying with the ideas of free will and morality under pressure. Director Joe Kosinski — currently riding high on the nearly simultaneous release of his movie Top Gun: Maverick, also starring Teller — keeps those themes intact, with a generous dollop of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Thor, Chris Hemsworth, dancing to ’80s soft rock on top.
Hemsworth co-stars as Steve Abnesti, head of Abnesti Pharmaceuticals, the company that somehow persuaded the federal government to loan it a few dozen maximum-security prisoners to serve as human guinea pigs (which might seem far-fetched, until you learn the wildly unethical history of U.S. government experimentation on prisoners). From a tropical island fortress, Abnesti and his team test “emotional regulation” drugs that can produce
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