Mr Robot is a drama series reflecting not only our problems and desires for revolution, but telling it in the way that most represents us: technology, and evidencing capitalism in the way it manifests for our generation: virtual money.
The plot is a critique of capitalism which is used as justification to destroy the banking system, so you can say it’s a pale copy of Fight club, with the difference that here the weapon is hacking and not explosive.
In the interview, the series creator Sam Esmail said that ‘’Mr. Robot’’ is based on three recent events:
The collapse of the stock market few years ago, the development in technology that created the space for serious hacking operations (Snowden, Assange) and finally the rise and fall of the ‘’Arab spring’’.
We are introduced to main character Elliot on the subway, with his frantic narration about the ‘’conspiracy that is bigger than all of us’’, and we slowly learn that Elliot tries to find out who's really pulling the strings in the inner workings of the corporate world, or as he puts it : “the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent who play God without permission.”
Elliot Alderson, who is played brilliantly by Rami Malek, is a computer genius and the psychological price for that is symptoms of autism. He’s brilliant, obsessive with computers and has no social skills, complete sociopath who abuses his power over the internet to understand the human condition and even himself.
Psychologically Elliott is barely able to hold onto reality, and we learn as the episodes progress ‘’Mr. Robot’’ is hallucination created by Elliot's psyche to justify, influence, or excuse his actions of saving the world by destroying Evil Corp. And, yeah it’s another reference to Fight Club.
Mr. Robot didn't exist except in Elliot's mind, like Tyler Durden in Narrator’s mind.
Elliot has regular appointments with psychiatrist, Krista Gordon (Gloria Reuben), and when she asks him why he feels so alienated, Elliot remains mute, but in his head, he gives us answer :
‘’Oh, I don't know. Is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man, even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children? Or maybe it's that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit? The world itself's just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our running commentary of bullshit, masquerading as insight, our social media faking as intimacy. Or is it that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. I'm not saying anything new. We all know why we do this, not because Hunger Games books makes us happy, but because we wanna be sedated. Because it's painful not to pretend, because we're cowards. Fuck society.’’
Esmail chose these narrations where Eliot directly addresses the audience, breaking the forth wall, and through these narrations we get a deep and intimate look into Elliot's psyche and it's not a pleasant place to live. Elliot’s personality is complicated but fascinating. He’s a sociopath, cynic about the world, but at the same time he deeply cares about that same world and wants to save it.
It’s a confident storytelling where Elliot is both delusional protagonist and unreliable narrator. The events we see are questionable because everything is from Elliot point of view and he is unstable, which gave Esmail great playground for making a puzzle for a viewer with subtle hints and clues.
It’s interesting that Esmail said in one interview “We were never worried about getting the audience to like Elliot.”
Cinematography and framing ‘’Mr. Robot’’ are amazing.
Characters are often placed at the very bottom of the frame, which leaves a lot of headroom that suggests a great weight hanging over their heads and creates atmosphere of isolation between them, when they’re talking to each other it feels like they are alone. Also, in the dialogue scenes actors communicate in opposite ends of the frame, leaving “leading room” between them. The effect creates feeling of paranoia and dissociation of the main character.
Director of photography Tod Campbell chose wider lens for close ups, and explained this decision in one interview:
“In close-ups of Elliot, everything else is so out of focus that it’s literally him floating in space. You can really connect with those big, gorgeous eyes and get a sense that we’re present with him.
Ultimately, I go back to this isolation thing in his head and trying to be in there with him. With all that headroom that we use, I was trying to erase what's around him, so that it’s just his head. Your eyes aren’t jumping to all the little bits and pieces of people crossing behind him, or all the other things that you might normally set up in the frame.”
If you didn’t pay attention closely there were only two handheld shots in the whole show (first is in the dream sequence, and the other is with Elliot finding Shayla in the trunk of a car)
and Campbell said about this:
“We had a steadicam operator the whole time, but we only used it once, in the finale, the Steadicam is really great for certain things, but in television, for a lot of directors, it's their lazy way out of shooting a scene. ‘Put it on the Steadicam, walk and talk, blah blah blah.’ We never wanted to do walk-and-talk.”
