Stephen Soderbergh may be “retired,” but you can’t very well keep a filmmaker with a like his vision down. After announcing his Hollywood sphere retirement, Soderbergh is back with a new project. “Command Z” is a dystopian sci-fi series that stars Michael Cera as the literal head of a group of time travelers looking to fix the past at what’s being coined as “America’s last inflection point.” The good ol’ present of 2023.
In typical Soderbergh style, it’s very unconventional. But fiction can be anything you want it to be, so there’s actually no wrong way to go about it. Even when the time machine is disguised as a dryer, they travel via neural link into the minds of people existing in 2023, and have to imbibe what looks like maple syrup to make the connection. Who’s to say that wouldn’t work? The idea is to take key figures of history and influence their thoughts to make “the future, our present, right now, more livable, fair, and decent for everyone.”
It also stars Roy Wood Jr. (“The Daily Show With Trevor Noah”), Liev Schreiber, Chloe Radcliffe (“The Middle Place”), Jacqueline Antaramian (“Succession”), and J.J. Maley (“Strange Loop“).
Boy don’t we wish it were that easy. Though their missions don’t appear to be as easy as it seems, as the first run sees one of the participants walk a man straight into traffic. Influencing another’s thoughts enough to sway what they do might be a rough task. So is this a movie broken into pieces? Or is it a series? Apparently the episodes range in time. So it’s hard to say. So, perhaps mini-series would be the better term.
“Command Z” releases July 17th, 2023. Read more about it on Soderbergh’s official blog here.
