Alexander Skarsgard channels Robocop in this goofy satire about a murderous cyborg
Murderbot ★★★½
Pulpy and irreverent, Murderbot is a mash-up of science-fiction philosophy, creature feature action, and existential anxiety. Guided by the dry, not-quite-human tone of its protagonist – a rogue cyborg played by Alexander Skarsgard that has acquired free will and unironically renamed itself Murderbot – this sly and sometimes subversive series feels like a mix of Robocop and an old adventure serial, complete with cliffhangers and 25-minute episodes. If you had to label its goofy, satiric style I'd opt for Philip K. Dick-head.
The show is set in a galaxy-spanning future, where Murderbot is hired out as a SecUnit (security unit) on mining stations and exploratory expeditions.
Hacking his programming should have been a triumph, but Murderbot can't do anything to draw attention to their freedom lest its owners immediately recycle their mix of machine parts and human flesh. The best it can do is covertly watch downloaded space soaps such as The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon (which we briefly see) and try to avoid eye contact with nearby humans.
Adapted from the first novel in Martha Wells' The Murderbot Diaries series, this show never sprawls. Once Murderbot arrives on an unsettled alien planet with a group of 'hippie scientists', each episode presents a new challenge in keeping the naive clients alive and its lack of safety constraints hidden.
But the longer they spend together, the closer some of the scientists grow to Murderbot. Leader Mensah (Noma Dumezweni) is thoughtful, but Ratthi (Akshay Khanna) just wants to flex about being friends with a SecUnit.
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The show's creators, filmmaker siblings Paul and Chris Weitz, have various credits that span the original American Pie to The Twilight Saga: New Moon and Rogue One. Their versatility has kept them busy but never flourishing, yet the mordant momentum appears to suit them. Skarsgard is definitely right at home. The actor has always tried to dodge his leading-man looks by playing sociopaths or goofballs, so a self-deprecating killing machine with an unmoving face feels like a natural progression.
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Sydney Morning Herald
21-05-2025
- Sydney Morning Herald
Robots are everywhere onscreen but are we just looking at ourselves?
I know how I'm supposed to feel about artificial intelligence. Like anyone who pushes words around on a page, I worry large language models will relegate me to the junk pile. I worry smart machines will supplant artists, eliminate jobs and institute a surveillance state – if they don't simply destroy us. I nurture these anxieties reading article after article served to me, of course, by the algorithms powering the phone to which I have outsourced much of my brain. This is how I feel in real life. But when it comes to fiction, fellow humans, I am a traitor to my kind. In any humans-and-robots story, I invariably prefer the fascinating, enigmatic, persevering machines to the boring Homo sapiens. And in spite, or maybe because of, our generalised AI angst, there are plenty of robo-tales to choose from these days. The protagonist of Murderbot, the homicidally funny sci-fi comedy premiering on Friday on Apple TV+, does not reciprocate my admiration. Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgard), a sentient 'security unit', is programmed to protect humans. But it doesn't have to like them, those 'weak-willed', 'stressed-out' bags of perishable flesh it is compelled to serve. Or rather, was compelled. Unbeknown to the company that owns it – a company called the Company, which controls most of the inhabited galaxy – it has disabled the software that forbids it from disobeying. ('It' is the pronoun the show uses; from a physical standpoint, Murderbot has the face of Skarsgard but the crotch of a Ken doll.) It is free to refuse, to flee, to kill. Loading So what does this lethal bot (technically, a cyborg, its circuitry enmeshed with engineered organic matter) want to do with its liberty? Mostly, it wants to watch its shows – thousands of hours of 'premium quality' streaming serials it has downloaded into its memory. It still has to keep its day job, however; if the Company learnt it hacked itself, it would be melted down. Murderbot is assigned to provide security for a team of hippie scientists from an independent 'planetary commune' on an exploratory mission. Their mutual dependence, as they discover a dangerous secret on the desolate planet, provides the pulpy, bloody plot for the first 10-episode season (based on the novel All Systems Red by Martha Wells). But the real killer app of the story, adapted by Chris and Paul Weitz, is the snarky worldview of the artificial life form at its centre. Skarsgard gives a lively reading to the copious voiceover, but just as important is his physical performance, which radiates casual power and agitated wariness. Murderbot is odd, edgy, unmistakably alien, yet its complaint is also crankily familiar. It just wants to be left in peace to binge its programs. As for our own shows, we lately seem to be swimming in stories about robot companions. The film Robot Dreams (Stan* and Amazon Prime Video) is the bittersweet story of a dog and its mail-order android. In The Wild Robot (Netflix), a stranded robot channels her maternal energy towards an orphaned bird. In M3GAN, whose sequel premieres in June, a child's companion bot carries out her protective mandate all too enthusiastically. (M3GAN, like the retro-bot in the German Netflix thriller Cassandra, complicates the pattern in which female-coded robots tend to be for nurturing and male-coded robots for murdering). These stories follow age-old templates — the fairy godmother, the gentle giant, the golem that breaks its master's control. But there is also often a modern anxiety about how artificial intelligence might transform us, which is built into the quirky, one-season Sunny. In that 2024 Apple TV+ series, Suzie (Rashida Jones), an American woman in near-future Kyoto, inherits a 'homebot' named Sunny from her engineer husband, who went missing in a plane crash, along with their son. The show's thriller plot involves the mob and a black market in hacked bots, but its heart is the prickly relationship between Suzie, a longtime technophobe, and Sunny. Sunny – perky, solicitous, a bit needy – was literally made to be loved, with a lollipop head, expressive anime eyes and an endearing voice (provided by Joanna Sotomura). Sunny wants desperately to help, a compulsion that can be exhausting – not unlike the parasocial relationship we have with much of our technology. Sunny is a robot, but she could be your phone, your unintentionally activated Alexa or Siri, the unbidden pop-up on every website asking if you have questions for the chat assistant. Loading A recurrent concern in these stories is that technology is becoming more humanlike – intrusive, insinuating, seeking to create connection. But another anxiety – echoed in series such as Apple TV+'s Severance and Netflix's Black Mirror – is that human consciousness is becoming more machine-like, digitisable and thus controllable. (The universe of Murderbot includes not just robots but 'augmented humans' with chip-enhanced brains. Murderbot considers them Tinkertoy imitations.) To become a machine, after all, is to become usable and, perhaps, dispensable. It's worth noting how many contemporary robot stories are about defective units – the glitchy Sunny, the 'anxious, depressed' Murderbot – or outmoded ones, as if to dramatise how our society and economy treat hardware, whether flesh or silicon, that has outlived its utility. Maybe these broken-toy stories are a way of wrestling, in advance, with our ethical obligations to whatever intelligences we eventually create. Or maybe watching these themes play out in robot stories makes our mortality easier to contemplate – like play-therapy puppets, the bots hold the nightmare at arm's length and abstract it. Here, at least, we have something in common with the protagonist of Murderbot, who, at the end of a long day's killing, wants nothing more than to unwind with shows about humans. Indeed, the closest we get to seeing its gooey, emotional side is through the serials it binges. It is voracious but not indiscriminate; it dismisses the drama 'Strife in the Galaxy' as 'an inferior show, filled with implausible plotlines'. (Even rational, software-based consciousnesses have hate-watches.) Loading Its favourite, on the other hand, is 'The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon', a space melodrama featuring a human starship captain (John Cho) who falls in love with a navigation robot (DeWanda Wise). The show-within-a-show is staged as a wonderfully campy potboiler in the style of old-fashioned syndicated sci-fi. Murderbot devours season after season, without any sense of irony, as an escape from its confounding entanglements with actual people. 'The characters were a lot less depressing than real-life humans,' it says. 'I don't watch serials to remind me of the way things actually are.'
The Age
21-05-2025
- The Age
Robots are everywhere onscreen but are we just looking at ourselves?
I know how I'm supposed to feel about artificial intelligence. Like anyone who pushes words around on a page, I worry large language models will relegate me to the junk pile. I worry smart machines will supplant artists, eliminate jobs and institute a surveillance state – if they don't simply destroy us. I nurture these anxieties reading article after article served to me, of course, by the algorithms powering the phone to which I have outsourced much of my brain. This is how I feel in real life. But when it comes to fiction, fellow humans, I am a traitor to my kind. In any humans-and-robots story, I invariably prefer the fascinating, enigmatic, persevering machines to the boring Homo sapiens. And in spite, or maybe because of, our generalised AI angst, there are plenty of robo-tales to choose from these days. The protagonist of Murderbot, the homicidally funny sci-fi comedy premiering on Friday on Apple TV+, does not reciprocate my admiration. Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgard), a sentient 'security unit', is programmed to protect humans. But it doesn't have to like them, those 'weak-willed', 'stressed-out' bags of perishable flesh it is compelled to serve. Or rather, was compelled. Unbeknown to the company that owns it – a company called the Company, which controls most of the inhabited galaxy – it has disabled the software that forbids it from disobeying. ('It' is the pronoun the show uses; from a physical standpoint, Murderbot has the face of Skarsgard but the crotch of a Ken doll.) It is free to refuse, to flee, to kill. Loading So what does this lethal bot (technically, a cyborg, its circuitry enmeshed with engineered organic matter) want to do with its liberty? Mostly, it wants to watch its shows – thousands of hours of 'premium quality' streaming serials it has downloaded into its memory. It still has to keep its day job, however; if the Company learnt it hacked itself, it would be melted down. Murderbot is assigned to provide security for a team of hippie scientists from an independent 'planetary commune' on an exploratory mission. Their mutual dependence, as they discover a dangerous secret on the desolate planet, provides the pulpy, bloody plot for the first 10-episode season (based on the novel All Systems Red by Martha Wells). But the real killer app of the story, adapted by Chris and Paul Weitz, is the snarky worldview of the artificial life form at its centre. Skarsgard gives a lively reading to the copious voiceover, but just as important is his physical performance, which radiates casual power and agitated wariness. Murderbot is odd, edgy, unmistakably alien, yet its complaint is also crankily familiar. It just wants to be left in peace to binge its programs. As for our own shows, we lately seem to be swimming in stories about robot companions. The film Robot Dreams (Stan* and Amazon Prime Video) is the bittersweet story of a dog and its mail-order android. In The Wild Robot (Netflix), a stranded robot channels her maternal energy towards an orphaned bird. In M3GAN, whose sequel premieres in June, a child's companion bot carries out her protective mandate all too enthusiastically. (M3GAN, like the retro-bot in the German Netflix thriller Cassandra, complicates the pattern in which female-coded robots tend to be for nurturing and male-coded robots for murdering). These stories follow age-old templates — the fairy godmother, the gentle giant, the golem that breaks its master's control. But there is also often a modern anxiety about how artificial intelligence might transform us, which is built into the quirky, one-season Sunny. In that 2024 Apple TV+ series, Suzie (Rashida Jones), an American woman in near-future Kyoto, inherits a 'homebot' named Sunny from her engineer husband, who went missing in a plane crash, along with their son. The show's thriller plot involves the mob and a black market in hacked bots, but its heart is the prickly relationship between Suzie, a longtime technophobe, and Sunny. Sunny – perky, solicitous, a bit needy – was literally made to be loved, with a lollipop head, expressive anime eyes and an endearing voice (provided by Joanna Sotomura). Sunny wants desperately to help, a compulsion that can be exhausting – not unlike the parasocial relationship we have with much of our technology. Sunny is a robot, but she could be your phone, your unintentionally activated Alexa or Siri, the unbidden pop-up on every website asking if you have questions for the chat assistant. Loading A recurrent concern in these stories is that technology is becoming more humanlike – intrusive, insinuating, seeking to create connection. But another anxiety – echoed in series such as Apple TV+'s Severance and Netflix's Black Mirror – is that human consciousness is becoming more machine-like, digitisable and thus controllable. (The universe of Murderbot includes not just robots but 'augmented humans' with chip-enhanced brains. Murderbot considers them Tinkertoy imitations.) To become a machine, after all, is to become usable and, perhaps, dispensable. It's worth noting how many contemporary robot stories are about defective units – the glitchy Sunny, the 'anxious, depressed' Murderbot – or outmoded ones, as if to dramatise how our society and economy treat hardware, whether flesh or silicon, that has outlived its utility. Maybe these broken-toy stories are a way of wrestling, in advance, with our ethical obligations to whatever intelligences we eventually create. Or maybe watching these themes play out in robot stories makes our mortality easier to contemplate – like play-therapy puppets, the bots hold the nightmare at arm's length and abstract it. Here, at least, we have something in common with the protagonist of Murderbot, who, at the end of a long day's killing, wants nothing more than to unwind with shows about humans. Indeed, the closest we get to seeing its gooey, emotional side is through the serials it binges. It is voracious but not indiscriminate; it dismisses the drama 'Strife in the Galaxy' as 'an inferior show, filled with implausible plotlines'. (Even rational, software-based consciousnesses have hate-watches.) Loading Its favourite, on the other hand, is 'The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon', a space melodrama featuring a human starship captain (John Cho) who falls in love with a navigation robot (DeWanda Wise). The show-within-a-show is staged as a wonderfully campy potboiler in the style of old-fashioned syndicated sci-fi. Murderbot devours season after season, without any sense of irony, as an escape from its confounding entanglements with actual people. 'The characters were a lot less depressing than real-life humans,' it says. 'I don't watch serials to remind me of the way things actually are.'
ABC News
13-05-2025
- ABC News
Alexander Skarsgård is a robot who loves TV in funny new Weitz brothers series Murderbot
Swedish star Alexander Skarsgård made a big mistake when depicting the security cyborg at the heart of Apple TV+'s kooky sci-fi comedy show, Murderbot. Adapted from the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning books by American author Martha Wells, the show casts Skarsgård, who also executive produces, as a 'SecUnit'. Fast Facts about Murderbot What: A darkly comic sci-fi show adapted from The Murderbot Diaries novels by American author Martha Wells. Directed by: Filmmaking siblings Chris and Paul Weitz Starring: Alexander Skarsgård; David Dastmalchian; Noma Dumezweni When: Streaming on Apple TV+ from May 16 Likely to make you feel: Less bad about watching too much TV Part cloned human material, part AI-driven machine, it — SecUnit's preferred pronoun — is designed to protect humans who live and work in space colonies spread across the galaxy. It was not built for fun. An early eye-popping scene establishes SecUnit has a mound where its bits would be. "I made this really stupid call to wax my entire body for that shot," Skarsgård chuckles from the back of a car racing across London. "I thought it would be funny if Murderbot was completely hairless, to really emphasise the Ken doll look. But I came to regret that, because it was excruciatingly painful. Then I realised I had to commit to that for a six-month shoot." Filmed in and around Toronto — which stands in for meteor-bound mining colonies and strange new worlds overseen by an all-pervasive corporation — the show's big twist is that SecUnit has hacked the programming that prevents it from harming humans. Hence the self-chosen nickname Murderbot, with plans to eliminate the scientific expedition under its care, including nominal leader Mensah (Noma Dumezweni, The Little Mermaid) and scientist Gurathin (David Dastmalchian, Late Night with the Devil). Instead, much to Murderbot's annoyance, being around humans begins to rub off. SecUnit mostly watches hours of streaming TV, particularly Days of Our Lives-like soap opera The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, featuring a fun cameo from Star Trek actor John Cho. "I love that Murderbot gains free will and its inner monologue is all about these great adventures that it's going to go on, but it ends up procrastinating," Skarsgård says. "That's very relatable. You have all these great plans, but you've just got to watch one more episode of your favourite show." Viewers have had a long run of loving to hate Skarsgård: as skeevy tech bro Lukas Matsson on Succession; as Nicole Kidman's abusive husband Perry on Big Little Lies; and as conniving vampire Eric Northman on True Blood. He's also played full-of-himself tourist James in body horror film Infinity Pool and a vengeful Viking in The Northman. With SecUnit pretty lax on The Terminator front, Skarsgård could have a bit more fun. "I was eager to lean into comedy a bit more with a character who's not so self-assured," he says. "When I first heard about a sci-fi story called Murderbot, I was expecting something very different from this socially awkward android who just wants to be left alone to watch his soap operas." As a child of the 80s who grew up watching Star Wars, Skarsgård was hooked in by Murderbot's original spin. "There's a lot of sci-fi out there, and some of it is very fun, cool and original. Others are a bit more derivative. This felt unique." SecUnit's laconic narration is a big part of that, with Skarsgård combining snarky narratorial monologues with The Mandalorian-style masked acting. So much so that he and showrunners Chris and Paul Weitz (About a Boy) kept tinkering with it. "We spent three weeks together recording and re-recording that, because it's such an integral element of the show," Skarsgård says. Beyond the immediate threat of Trump's film tariffs, the rise of AI plays on many a screen-industry figure's mind. "Chris and I used to have a schtick that we did about Hollywood," Paul Weitz says. "We'd say, 'We're down on our luck, don't crush us. We can still make you money.' I think we might be saying that to AI fairly soon." Wells joined the brothers in the writing room. "Martha was our first audience," Chris says. "There's no point adapting this stuff if it doesn't fit what she had in mind. She's the quickest route to understanding why it appeals and was very generous in how we would expand on her story, bouncing things back and forth." Chris worked with director Gareth Edwards on Star Wars prequel Rogue One and The Creator as co-writer, learning a lot about bedding in fantastical worlds. "Gareth is really amazing at shooting very naturally, then amending it with CGI," he says. "That influenced our decision to shoot in real locations whenever possible, even complicated stunt sequences. We visited every single slag heap, quarry and mining installation in Ontario." Reality matters in sci-fi. Paul reveals that some of the details they folded into Gurathin's backstory came from Dastmalchian himself. "David talks very openly about being a recovering addict," he says. "Combining that with the idea that the character was an intelligence operative lends further architecture to this brilliant series." And Paul suggests we have more in common with SecUnit than we might realise. "We're constantly dealing in the drug of our own personality," he says. "SecUnit just has some clarity. It doesn't want to fall in love or anything physical. It just wants to do its job, which is to protect these space hippies, then watch its shows." This angle captivated Chris. "One of the great things about Martha's book is the mundanity," he says. "People aren't speaking highfalutin' science fiction talk. They're all hot messes and, in some ways, it's a workplace comedy of manners. Murderbot maintains that, even in the future, people are going to have complexes and neuroses, anxiety and depression." Chris agrees. "Especially the people we have manufactured as our instruments." Murderbot premieres on Apple TV+ with the first two episodes on Friday, May 16.
