Awake not Woke!

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.

I really wanted to like this but the first episode alone is full of problems. The acting is all over the place with some truly terrible performances by some of the actors. The story and writing make no sense and are completely unbelievable. We are told he is a genius app developer but his app seems to be garbage. It doesn't' do anything any random analyst wouldn't be able to do. It's also hard to believe an agency like this would be populated by a small handful of random people and not have a bunch of agents and massive government oversight like in episode 1. Suddenly in episode 2 there are people everywhere and the agency seems to be much larger out of nowhere. Then there is the problems presented by the shows ability to loop and reset time. This allows for pretty much any character to be killed at random because the time loop just resets and it doesn't matter. This ruins a lot of the tension and danger. You just know as soon as anyone dies or something really bad happens that means they won't stop the disaster and time will be reset. It kind of makes everything pointless eventually. In the very first scene we already have the mixed race couple. There is a casual racist anti-white minority victimhood comment. The agency recruiter is an Indian woman. Head of the agency is female. This is yet another DEI minority extravaganza where white seems to be a minority except if its a villain. Given this was cancelled after 2 seasons with no ending 2 episodes was enough for me.