The latest Netflix original movie to star some major Hollywood names and actors is Spiderhead, a psychological thriller starring Chris Hemsworth and Miles Teller. The movie is set on an island where studies are performed with pharmaceutical drugs on inmates by the mysterious, charismatic Steve Abnesti.
While the movie was directed by Joseph Kosinski, of Top Gun: Maverick fame, it didn’t meet with the kind of critical success that Netflix may have hoped for. Both fans and critics have said that the movie doesn’t live up to the interesting premise it sets out with, and it is hard to argue that several elements of the movie don’t make sense by the end.
5 The Prison
It is bizarre that there is no mention of any other staff helping Abnesti besides his sit-in assistant, Mark, who eventually betrays him. The facility is cleaned and operated by the prisoners they test on, yet there is never a mention of how Abnesti got government permission to administer these drugs, or how they are so silently mass-produced for him.
Assumedly, there is a larger company of people that help him on the outside, but the contained style of Spiderhead makes it impossible to understand how he got into this position. It is especially illogical that Abnesti admits Jeff and Lizzy have both served their sentences and were free to go weeks before they finally escape his clutches. While other Netflix movies might look even more ridiculous,Spiderhead didn't do a great job with its setting.
4 The Drugs
Spiderhead is a sci-fi movie at heart and doesn’t try to explain in-depth how the drugs Abnesti uses really work. Processes in the brains of the inmates are affected in ways such as the love drug and horror drug, which are both self-explanatory in what they do, even if the logic behind them working is entirely ignored.
While the final drug revealed in the third act is the least sensical of all, mostly used as a final twist for the movie, it doesn’t make sense that Abnesti could have previously tested the drug well enough to initially place himself within reach of so many dangerous people. Without a high level of certainty in his own safety, it wouldn’t make sense for him to have built the facility in this fashion in the first place. These drugs weren't one of the better sci-fi movie inventions in recent years.
3 The Lack of Conflict
While the movie sets itself up like a fairly traditional thriller, in the first hour or so, it does so with an incredible lack of anything really happening besides the setup. Pacing is a difficult thing to perfect even for great movies in the sci-fi genre, but Spiderhead doesn’t try to do anything besides give Miles Teller some hints of suspicion for a majority of the runtime. It is confusing to have so little conflict and to spend such a large proportion of the movie just setting up the concept. If it was an especially unusual concept, this strategy would make more sense.
However, given that many movies in the psychological and sci-fi thriller genres have used similar setups, it didn’t make sense for the movie to leave itself completely without interesting events. Nothing was out of the ordinary at the facility and the movie merely hinted at strange goings-on by telling stories from the perspectives of different characters in an unreliable manner. This storytelling style has plagued many Netflix productions and didn't help Spiderhead much either.
2 The Storytelling
Storytelling devices in the movie’s script are terribly repetitive, and viewers are constantly left with half-truths from multiple character perspectives to try and hide information for later reveals. Unfortunately, it doesn’t end up making sense. One example of this is Miles Teller’s character pretending that his girlfriend is still alive when she in fact perished in the same car accident that landed him in the facility.
While it isn’t an odd thing for a movie to use unreliable narration to leave a twist for later in the story, Spiderhead does it multiple times from multiple perspectives to constantly try and shock, when the setup gives away early the fact that there will be twists later on. Narratively, the movie feels lazy in doing this so much and fails to land a strong third act because it relies so heavily upon misinforming the viewers early on.
1 The Casting
While Chris Hemsworth is an excellent actor and one who works incredibly well from a marketing aspect, Spiderhead managed to fail quite spectacularly considering it also stars one of the hottest stars and the hottest director of the summer. Unfortunately, Hemsworth was clearly not the right choice for Abnesti’s role. His comedic style and charm don’t fit, he feels more like a standard cult leader in the way he tries to convince his patients that what they are doing is right, instead of the parody-style sociopath that the original story of Spiderhead contained.
This did not help the movie, which seemed to find itself struggling with how to handle the dark comedy of the short story it was based on from very early on. Instead, what was left is a bit of tonal confusion over which direction the movie could go, feeling more like a sci-fi horror than anything else. It was particularly confusing given the fact that the script was written by the duo behind Deadpool, and so should have come through quite strongly in dark comedic terms. Instead, it was an overly serious movie that never managed to get off the ground or go anywhere more than exactly where most viewers will have expected it to go from the very beginning.