During the extra bank holiday, I’ve sought sanctuary in Silo, Apple TV+’s dystopian sci-fi adaptation. The first two episodes dropped day-one and I’m hooked!
Whereas Foundation was a shiny screensaver that failed to resonate with this viewer, Silo’s a prestige drama filled with conspiracy and clawing claustrophobia, themes I’ll never tire of since The X-Files’ heyday!
Hugh Howey, the creator of Silo, speculates entirely AI-generated productions are only a few years away: “We are less than a year or two away from giving AI a film script and then watching that film the same day. Production costs are going to go to ZERO. Within 5 years, great-looking films will be made this way. Within 20 years, almost all films will be made this way.”
Prescient given the current writers strike and we all know what happened last time to Heroes, Lost and Battlestar Galactica! From deepfake technology to replacing creatives in the pursuit of profit, artificial intelligence (AI) is deeply embedded in our daily lives. Been using Bard from Google for a few weeks but have no plans to relinquish creative chores to AI (as yet)!
Featuring a stellar cast surviving day-to-day in a detailed lived-in universe reminiscent of 10 Cloverfield Lane and Fallout, I can’t wait to discover the mysterious dark secrets of this labyrinthine Silo.
Living in a silo is a great setting for sci fi, I have used this concept myself in a piece I wrote a while ago to capture some ideas. It‘s almost as complex as living in a generation populated interstellar ship, where the inhabitants culture morphs and evolves and mutates over time and new hierarchies and class systems get established around limited resources. Logan‘s run was one of the best movies in that setting, juxtaposing an age limited hedonistic society with an unknown „outside“. It is very reminiscent of this and I am looking forward to what spin the auteurs have put on the tropes