Tv Review: Silo
SILO is a series on Apple TV+ that I first became aware of when I was at my local comic shop and I saw the trailer on its television. Starring Rebecca Ferguson, it is set in a post-apocalypse setting where all of humanity's seeming survivors are living in a vertical shaft with no contact to the outside world. Well, almost no contact. If you make trouble in the Silo, you are sent out to "clean", which is a guaranteed execution as no one survives more than a few minutes in the toxic environment--or do they?
Silo, honestly, feels very much like one of those dystopian YA novels that were written and released in the wake of the Hunger Games' success. Just, well, instead of a teenage protagonist, it stars an adult woman. There's still a lot of writing moments that feel similar to what you'd get if you picked up one of those books, though. The protagonist, Juliette, starts as a working class mechanic but gets promoted to being the Sheriff due to sheer circumstance, followed by unravelling the conspiracy of the Silo within a few days. Oh and she's doing it because she's attempting to find out the fate of her boyfriend who died of "suicide" a few years back.
That doesn't mean the show is bad by any stretch of the imagination but it does feel like they're being a bit soap opera-ish about the whole thing. I've read the original novellas and they're short and to the point. To fit a full eight hour run-time, they clearly had to add a lot of padding to the story in order to make it fill out. This includes lots of daddy issues, mommy issues, and romantic back and forth that doesn't really contribute much to the larger question of what is going on behind the scenes.
The acting does a lot of the heavy lifting even if I don't necessarily care about the personal relationships of the leads. Rebecca Ferguson does a great job of showing why she's beloved in the Mission Impossible franchise. Common also does an excellent job as Sims, the man who does the majority of the heavy lifting to keep the powers that be satisfied. Tim Robins is also obviously playing the villain but he does so in such a way that you guess he has reasons even when they remain unclear. Other good roles like Ian Glenn as Juliette's father are great too.
The set design for the show is fantastic and I have to give everyone involved props for their jobs here. The place really does look like people have been living here with limited resources for two hundred years. The analog technology has a pseudo-1950s feel and invokes Fallout even if it's not the same sort of dense and wacky story.
In conclusion, this is a really solid and entertaining story and I think if you are a fan of post-apocalypse science fiction then you will probably enjoy Silo. The characters are good, the set design is amazing, and the story is mostly entertaining. I just think they probably should have trimmed down the story of its more melodramatic parts to make a two or two and a half hour movie.
