The Eternaut

What do you get when you fill the blender with one part I Am Legend, one tablespoon of The Last of Us, a dash of Day After Tomorrow, and a teaspoon of The Road? We get a rather lovely mix of apocalyptic drama and sci-fi flavoured thriller, which is the best way to describe the Netflix miniseries The Eternaut.

This series is produced by a South American company, the cast is Argentinian, it's set in Buenos Aires, and as the pilot episode opens, we meet a group of teenage girls who, in the middle of a day out on a sailboat, are suddenly killed when they are hit by what look like ordinary snowflakes. The flakes are not really snow, however. They are not frozen water falling to the ground as usual, but instead a highly effective and well-masked weapon of mass destruction that "looks like snow", which is being used to wipe out humanity. After the sailboat incident, we follow Juan, Favalli, Lucas, and Omar - four elderly uncles who are sitting in a basement playing poker when the precipitation starts to slaughter millions.

The series consists of six episodes and initially the pace is very slow. That typical American doomsday panic in the style of World War Z or War of the Worlds never materialises, instead we are offered a rather intimate character portrait of a bunch of ignorant uncles. You can tell that showrunner Bruno Stagnaro has allowed himself to settle in many of the key scenes and that he doesn't want to build drama through shock effects or graphic violence, but rather a kind of primitive anxiety in the midst of all the uncertainty. It works well, in my opinion. At times very well. Of course, in order to move around outdoors, you have to protect yourself from the deadly poisonous precipitation and, as if that wasn't enough, in episode four there turns out to be a bigger threat behind the attack, which bares its grisly face.

The Eternaut is, in my opinion, no masterpiece and there are exciting passages that feel a bit thin, where the characters and their behaviour do not match the total panic that at least I would experience if 80% of humanity died after a snowstorm while I was sitting at home, with boarded up doors and windows, without electricity, water, or food. However, I will say, that The Eternaut is better than 99% of everything Netflix has offered in the last year and is a series that, despite some weaknesses, I think you should check out.