Netflix’s Spiderhead Lacks the Charm of the Story It’s Based On

George Saunders, 63, is a rare type of dude: He writes weird stuff that people actually read. “I didn’t really read a lot of it when I was young,” Saunders answered, then launched into an emotionally charged reminiscence of watching the first Star Wars and seeing the “ships fly over your head“ and noting “that they’re all kind of junked up on the bottom. “I thought, ‘Oh yeah, no matter how advanced we get—whether we have robotic cars or whatever—we’re still gonna fuck everything up with our humanness.’” This is relevant because available on Netflix right now is a big-budget sci-fi flick called Spiderhead, which was adapted from a 2010 short story Saunders wrote in The New Yorker called “Escape From Spiderhead.” The story is effectively a two-hander between Jeff, an inmate-slash-subject in a brazenly immoral pharmaceutical experiment, and Abnesti, the apparently happy-go-lucky experimenter. Spiderhead’s director is Joseph Kosinski, who is currently enjoying traditional box-office success with Top Gun: Maverick. To its credit, Spiderhead does retain a lot of the author’s trademark bizarro, dead-eyed corporate-speak, most notably some soul-crushing pharma brand names.