TV Review: The I-Land (2019). A bizarre, undercooked, and frustrating mystery adventure.

Image courtesy of Netflix

Tv Review: The I-Land (2019) by Ben Jeffries (17/9/2019)

Season 1 (12/9/2019)

7 episodes, 37-43 minutes

Scifi, Drama, Mystery, Adventure

Streaming on Netflix

As The I-Lands amnesiac cast-aways question whether they’re in purgatory, viewers may find themselves asking the same thing.

When ten people wake up on a treacherous island with no memory of who they are or how they got there, they set off on a trek to try to get back home. They soon discover this world is not as it seems. Faced with the island's extreme psychological and physical challenges, they must rise to their better selves, or die as their worst ones. Created by Anthony Salter and Executive Produced by Neil LaBute (Van Helsing), The I-Land is a pulpy genre hybrid that seems incapable of maintaining a steady tone, pace, or perspective for more than a few moments.

It’s difficult to put a finger on what The I-Land really wants to be. It clearly borrows quite heavily from a mystery box show, a-la Lost, in both setting and tone, leaning into it’s own mysteries of the survivors origins and the nature of the island on which they find themselves. But before the characters, or the audience, can get too comfortable in that groove the story swerves suddenly into science fiction thriller territory, becoming a dystopian techno-thriller that feels like a blend of The Matrix and Lord of the Flies. For the rest of the series The I-Land flips back and forth between those two modes, dallying in various states of character drama, gritty thriller, and schlocky horror on the way. It’s a jumbled mess of tones and wandering focus that never nails down a perspective from which to come at it’s own story, or even what the story it wants to tell actually is. The only consistent goal seems to be keeping the audience guessing about one element of the show or another, but there’s never a compelling reason to be invested enough in the show to bother guessing, because we’re taught early on that at any moment something could happen that will totally re-order the way the show works.

In it’s attempt at mystery storytelling The I-Land goes so far as to reference Lost directly in it’s opening scene, recreating with Nathalie Martinez’s character the iconic shot where Mathew Fox’s character Jack opens his eye’s in the jungle. The problem the Netflix production has is that it doesn’t seem to understand that this type of story operates on a setup and payoff model. It makes a good start on the setup portion of the equation by positioning it’s characters in a place where they know exactly as much as the audience does about the situation, which is nothing. The character become the perfect audience avatar, able to react genuinely to the bizarre and suspicious world in which they find themselves. As the survivors get to know each other on the beach there are the first inklings of alliances and rivalries, developing romantic interests and personality clashes. Obvious secrets lurk at the edges of the story with the potential to alter the shape of the show. There’s an ominous, paranoid, atmosphere that’s rich in possibilities for drama and suspense. But The I-Land fumbles that setup, failing to convert it’s potential into a meaningful, or even entertaining, payoff.

Lost teased out it’s reveals, treating it’s twists like stones dropped into a pond, observing as the ripples of consequence slowly spread out and affected each part of the story that they touched, fundamentally shifting the trajectory of the show. The I-Land treats it’s twists like bricks dropped into a puddle. They make a big splash, splattering anyone nearby in the fallout, and then seconds later you have the same puddle, only now there’s a brick in it. The surprises are never allowed to sit with the audience, there’s no space for them to resonate, and they rarely seem to have any meaningful impact on the way things play out.

The writing doesn’t have a firm grasp of how to land the type of storytelling the show is trying for, and the directing doesn’t have a firm grasp on how to present that story either. Any scene with more than two characters tends to lose track of people fairly quickly, reducing core cast to little more than extras in group scenes. When they are on camera, the characters energy doesn’t always feel appropriate to the the scene, or match the energy of other performers, sometimes even when they’re sharing a scene. Scenes tend to run longer than they should, with conversations going round in circles, like an improv group that can’t find their way out of a sketch. As the show flops around trying to find a tone to settle on, the cast are left trying to keep up as things go from paranoid and suspicious to all out conflict to emotionally harrowing.

At the worst end of the spectrum the performances are functional, and some of the cast are at least having fun with their under written parts. Each of the survivors has a distinct, albeit stereotypical, personality. There’s the smart, introverted younger guy named Mason(Gilles Geary), the maternal, caring Blair (Sibylla Dean), a couple of “alpha male” bro types in Brody (Alex Pettyfer) and Moses (Kyle Schmid), and the catty younger woman Taylor(Kota Eberhardt). Nathalie Martinez plays the lead role of Chase, the first one to wake up on the beach at the beginning of the show. She’s capable and determined, and fills in as the “hero” of the group for the most part.

It’s a role that asks a lot of the performer, as Martinez essentially has to do double duty as an audience surrogate, reacting to the increasingly wild revelations the show trots out, while also propelling the plot as the shows dramatic lead. Martinez finds a workable balance, playing Chase as tough and clever, but the performance falls emotionally flat considering the dramatic stakes her character faces as the series ramps up the pace and shock-value of it’s revelations. Ronald Peet injects some more nuanced emotion into his performance as Cooper, the level headed one of the group, but there’s just not enough space in the show for him to explore the character. Any of the space that he could have used has been swallowed up by the disproportionate amount of screen time dedicated to Kate Bosworth’s character, K.C.

Of the whole cast Bosworth is doing the most acting. K.C. is a kind of mysterious, brooding antagonist to Martinez’s Chase in the early episodes, before becoming a secondary lead character in the middle portions of the series as the show becomes preoccupied with the Lifetime Network drama of her life, and then finally being almost forgotten in the rush to the finale. The amount of focus given to her character is a prime example of how The I-Land can’t decide what it wants to be. As the series develops, the characters begin to recover their memories, and the audience get to know everyone more intimately via a series of flashbacks. Of the ten survivors K.C. gets the most thoroughly explored backstory. It forms the B story for an entire episode, while most of the other survivors are left with a single scene to explain who they were before they came to the I-Land. It seems obvious that the intensity with which the show engages with K.C.’s origins and character will lead to some big moment of redemption or an important revelation that will affect the plot. It doesn’t.

There are some interesting moments of character acting from Bosworth as she relives her memories, and K.C. becomes a more interesting character as a result, but there’s nothing unfamiliar or fresh about the story itself, and if a show with a seven episode run is going to spend this much time dwelling on the maudlin experiences of one of it’s characters, it should at least find a way to tie that sub plot into the shows overarching theme of redemption. It doesn’t. It’s just stuff that happens while the actual plot of the show is happening elsewhere.

The I-Land feels like a Twilight Zone episode that got away from the writer, like it developed a momentum of it’s own and they couldn’t figure out how to stop writing it. It pretends like it’s grappling with serious subject matter of crime and punishment, redemption, and the nature of good and evil. What it’s actually doing is killing time between bouts of shock value violence and whiplash plot twists. The ideas the show is working with aren’t grist for it’s narrative mill, they’re just references and tropes, prompts for a creative writing assignment. At every opportunity the show gets to do something interesting, it doesn’t, instead it has a character deliver exposition about what’s happening and then tries to shock or surprise the audience.

It seems safe to say that The I-Land isn’t going to be showing up on anyone’s list of the top 10 shows of 2019. It’s uneven, shallow, and ultimately frustrating. That’s not to say there isn’t a fun experience to be had while watching it, which is why this review is as devoid of spoilers as I can make it while still addressing the content. The best fun to be had with the show is in the reveals and twists it takes. They aren’t simply bold or ambitious, they’re flat out wild, genre bending, leaps which redefine the show every few episodes. In this era of peak tv where shows like Mindhunter, Succesion, or Undone, demand so much from their audiences, both intellectually and emotionally, the idea of something less fraught can be appealing. If you just want some brainless genre tv to veg out to on a Sunday afternoon, if you want something that demands nothing from it’s audience, then The I-Land isn’t the worst option. If you enjoy hokey B-Grade genre stuff, sure, go ahead and check it out, that’s 100% what this is. The I-Land seems like a show custom made for the type of viewing experience where you sit with friends and yell at the tv over wine and snacks.

With it’s bizarrely tangential plot, wonky directing, and uneven performances, the experience of watching The I-Land is one of morbid curiosity rather than genuine entertainment. It’s unclear if the show is challenging the audience to figure out what it’s trying to be, or if it just never figured out what it wanted to be in the first place. There’s a twisty, over explained, and under written story running through it’s centre, but it’s built from lesser copies of moments and ideas borrowed from other, better, fiction that have been roughly taped together. Despite it’s idyllic backdrop of sun-drenched tropical landscapes, it's hard to see The I-Land turning into a popular destination for viewers.

4.5/10

The I-Land Stars: Nathalie Martinez, Kate Bosworth, Ronald Peet, Kyle Schmid, Sibylla Deen, Gilles Geary, Anthony Lee Medina, Kote Eberhardt, Alex Pettyfer

Created by: Anthony Salter

Written by: Neil Labute, Lucy Teitler,

Directed by: Jonathon Scarfe, Darnell Martin, Neil LaBute

a Production from: Netflix Studios, Nomadic Pictures

Distributed by: Netflix