Awake not Woke!

Well 5 minutes in and I already absolutely hate the kid and want the character to die off. Spoilers follow but it's all in the first 10 minutes anyway. Movie tells us the white male is an abusive, racist p.o.s. who hates the kid, except it never shows any of that on screen other than 1 loud verbal fight with the kids mother. She than violently attacks and bashes him over the head and left for unconscious. We are not shown or told why. She leaves the idiot moron child behind and escapes. The male comes to and goes outside with a gun. Reasonable after being attacked. The unhinged and apparently mentally deranged child shoots an arrow at him narrowly missing. TWICE! He does nothing but tries to talk the kid down, even though he's holding a gun and the kid is actively trying to shoot him. Sounds like a violent abusive person to me. The kid than shoots him and dances around singing and celebrating like an absolute psychotic future serial killer. That's not a good start. The writing is pretty bad. A character in a dinner is acting shady talking on the phone and writes down a meeting place and time on a napkin, then immediately crumbles it up and leaves it on his plate and leaves. WTF was the point of writing it down then? This is boring pretentious filmmaking at it's worst. Seems all males are either idiots, violent criminals or both and just all around bad. The females are all innocent victims just trying to survive. 45 minutes of stupidity was all I could take.

This isn’t free of woke content.

It’s not a bad movie, but yeah, it definitely has woke elements. Just because it’s a Guillermo del Toro film doesn’t mean it avoids that kind of stuff. Pretty much everything he makes is heavily rooted in social symbolism, and in this case the female character is clearly shaped by a kind of feminism that doesn’t really line up with the time period the movie is trying to portray. The messaging is there from the very start, and it’s distracting. At times it’s so on the nose it almost feels like a modern day "Karen". That said, the movie still has strong craftsmanship, great cinematography and solid execution. But at the end of the day, it’s just another Frankenstein story, nothing more. Way too much hype for a filmmaker who tends to get overpraised in that space. And that's fine, he does his job very well. But, it doesn’t break new ground or redefine anything, it’s just well put together, and that’s it. P.S.: I do like his movies, but this one feels like a straight-up cash grab.

Great acting

Minimal scene movies like this tend to showcase good acting skills. Chris Pratt hit it out of the park, like Colin Farrell in Phone Booth, or the full cast of The Man from Earth. The only woke element I noticed is the diminutive black lady beating a full-size white guy in a rooftop brawl. It would be a spoiler to discuss more about her. The story is not bad. It is similar to The Minority Report. A similar concept was tried in real life. Algorithmic programs were used to determine sentencing of criminals with no consideration of ethnicity or gender. It was a failure. Black culture was triggering longer, more severe sentencing. It had the effect of appearing even more racist than the human judges.

After the first two episodes, I would give this show a negative wokeness rating. Michelle Pfeiffer's character has old fashion values and the show makes fun of her very progressive daughter and grandchildren. The people in the flyover states are depicted in a positive manner for once.