Summary
Love, Death + Robots still has its share of highlights in Season 4, but it also features more filler than usual and lacks a clear standout.
Anthologies are always a mixed bag by definition, but Tim Miller and David Fincher’s Love, Death + Robots has remained remarkably consistent throughout its first three seasons on Netflix. That trend unfortunately ends with Season 4, which for the first time contains more misses than hits. Nothing is outright bad, necessarily, but depressingly few of the shorts leave a real lasting impact, and there’s nothing of the conceptual boldness of Season 3’s masterfully ambiguous “Jibaro”.
This is more a criticism of the curation process than it is the quality of the shorts themselves. That, at least, remains consistently high, with varied styles of art and animation being flexed to tremendous effect more often than not. But in the ten-episode collection, only half of them last longer than ten minutes, and even then cut off a couple of minutes earlier than the advertised runtime. In Season 3, only one episode ran below ten minutes, and several were closer to 20. This was also true of the first and second seasons.
Length isn’t everything — so I’m told, anyway — but it’s indicative of a larger problem. What were once the brief palate-cleansing episodes between longer fare now constitute the bulk of the season, meaning there’s much less thematic meat to dig into. An episode with the moral complexity of, say, “Bad Travelling”, isn’t really possible in this format, and the longer episodes tend to make space for more elaborate action rather than chewier storytelling.
One episode, for instance, is a six-minute Red Hot Chili Peppers concert redone with string puppets. Visually sumptuous though it may be — it’s directed by David Fincher, the first time he has gotten behind the camera for any of these episodes — it is nonetheless just a couple of songs, absent any plot or deeper ideas. A late anthology-within-an-anthology is similar, featuring a handful of claymation home appliances slagging off their dopey human owners.
The second episode is a stylistic sequel to “Night of the Mini Dead”, using the same tilt-shifted stop-motion visual style but feeling a little conceptually worn out in its similarities to a — in my view, at least — better version of the same idea. What it suggests about how continuity can work in a collection like this is interesting, but not really capitalized on elsewhere. One episode — the excellent “Spider Rose” — is set in the same sci-fi universe as the Volume 3 episode “Swarm”, but doesn’t feel like a direct sequel in the way “Three Robots” and “Three Robots: Exit Strategies” did.
A still from Love, Death + Robots Season 4 | Image via Netflix
There are highlights here, don’t get me wrong. The best, alongside the aforementioned “Spider Rose”, is probably “The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur”, which is surprisingly the one starring Mr. Beast. A hybrid of Gladiator, Jurassic Park, and The Fast and the Furious, it’s a brilliantly kinetic spectacle that also manages to find a deeper sense of character, despite the absence of any overt exposition or context. “400 Boys” and “How Zeke Got Religion” are another pair of standouts, animated to resemble a graphic novel and a Saturday morning cartoon, respectively, but taking sharp turns into shlocky uber-violence and general weirdness to keep things interesting.
Themes do begin to emerge — religion being one and, oddly, cats being another; two episodes are devoted almost entirely to them — but feel underexplored in such short bursts. Most episodes are crying out for a longer version that better digs into their worlds and ideas. A rare live-action installment starring Rhys Darby as a vicar asked to entreat with an emissary of an enigmatic aquatic alien race feels like it’s missing a few minutes before and after that would have given it more heft, and I, for one, am curious to see the outcome of an orange cat and his new robot friend’s efforts to take over the world.
I wouldn’t want to be too negative, since Love, Death + Robots Season 4 is still visually stunning and offers a rich banquet of artistic output that absolutely deserves to be seen, but I just feel slighted by how little substance there is here. The core quality remains at an extremely high standard, which is to be expected four seasons in, but after such a great and varied previous season, this can’t help but feel like a bit of a step down.
