Review: USA's Mr. Robot is a Smart, Sly Technothriller

Posted on June 17, 2015

USA Network has a real gem in its new summer line up. Mr. Robot is a gripping techno-thriller that isn't like any show on television now. Rami Malek (The Pacific, Night at the Museum, Twilight) stars as Elliot, a genius computer hacker who works at a computer security company by day. At night, he uses his hacking skills to get justice for those that cannot get it for themselves.

Elliot believes that "the top 1% of 1%" of the business elite are "playing God without permission." This secret cabal runs the world while the populace is oblivious. In the pilot, Elliot deftly takes down a seemingly mild mannered coffee shop chain owner, who actually makes his money by selling child pornography all over the world. What he does is illegal, of course. But Elliot doesn't really play by the rules.

He has social anxiety disorder and has had some kind of delusions in the past, for which he sees a psychologist (Gloria Reuben). He thought at one point that men in dark suits were following him, but he tells his shrink that they are gone. They are not gone, and they are not delusions. In fact, they work for a huge multinational conglomerate that is a client of the firm where Elliot works. The firm's name is E Corp., but Elliot thinks of them as Evil Corp. Their logo looks a lot like the Enron logo.

Elliot is tracking down a hacker who has penetrated Evil Corp. While heading home on the subway he's contacted by a mysterious man whose shirt reads Mr. Robot (Christian Slater). Mr. Robot heads a group of Anonymous-style hackers whose goal is to expose Evil Corp and its brethren as the force behind much of the global unrest and the economic misery many are facing. He asks Elliot to help him take down the company that owns 70% of Americans' credit card and student loan debt. Elliot sympathizes with the goal of exposing evil, but isn't so sure that causing an economic crash is a good idea.

The first thing that becomes obvious from watching the show is that this is what Black Hat should have been. In that film we watched Chris Hemsworth battle hackers as he hopped around the globe and it was incredibly boring. The whole thing was a snooze fest. By contrast, the scene where Elliot is going head to head with the hackers while he's in the server farm at Evil Corp. is exciting. Your on the edge of your seat waiting to see what happens next. This is how you write a hacking scene that lets the audience participate and actually care about what happens next.

The script is edgy and pulled straight from the headlines. The tone reminds us a bit of the AMC paranoid spy drama Rubicon, which was prematurely cancelled. Certainly there are shades of Person of Interest here. Elliot's views are pretty cynical and jaded for prime time TV. He's also not your usual hero, or even anti-hero. He's got problems, but he's trying to do what's right.

He's very skilled at reading other people, he is just terrible at interacting with them. So he hacks their lives to try to help. His interactions with Mr. Robot are gripping, as is his conversation with a rising up and comer at Evil Corp, Tyrell Wellick (Martin Wallström) He's an executive, but he runs Linux. That is a very telling detail, we'll just leave it at that. Carly Chaikin co-stars as a skilled hacker who befriends Elliot and Portia Doubleday is Angela Moss, Elliot's best friend since childhood.

Creator and showrunner Sam Esmail does a great job of showcasing the disaffection and disillusionment of a younger generation who knows how to use technology to bring about change. But it's not all about Millennials: Christian Slater's character is clearly a man with a vision whose ideas for changing the world lean towards the apocalyptic.

The show premieres on June 24th on USA Network. This is one of the best pilots we've seen in a long time and can't wait to see where the story goes next.

USA NETWORK