HBO Max
With each streaming TV collection receiving a surplus of episodes to inform their tales, it’s develop into commonplace—if not a cliché—for reveals to take their candy time growing their narratives. Not so with Dream Raider, HBO Max’s new Mandarin-language sci-fi drama a couple of workforce of legislation enforcement brokers and scientists utilizing cutting-edge know-how to enter into the “dreamscapes” of comatose sufferers in an try to search out out who’s manipulating them like them puppets. There’s extra motion packed into the primary jiffy of this eight-part HBO Asia manufacturing’s premiere than might be present in most likeminded small-screen efforts, to the purpose that it nearly seems as if the endeavor is taking part in a recreation to see simply how a lot plot it will probably race by way of in every of its 45-minute chapters.
On the premise of the present’s preliminary two episodes (which have been all that was offered to press), the reply to that question is: so much. Debuting on Feb. 17, Dream Raider begins with one in all many memorably haunting photographs: that of similar-looking younger ladies wearing white tank tops and black shorts marching up the steps of a dystopian metropolis’s metal mill to its roof, the place they systematically step off a ledge and plummet right into a fiery incinerator like brainwashed lemmings. There’s one thing inherently unreal about this suicidal sight, and that impression is amplified by Detective Li Xiao (Weber Yang) and his accomplice Che Na’s (Aggie Hsieh) ensuing discovery of two sisters wearing that very same uniform at a roadside accident. Whereas a kind of ladies perishes, the opposite winds up in a coma, and within the first of what is going to be quite a few fortuitous (learn: laughably contrived) turns, her physician informs Li that, years in the past, he attended a Northern District College lecture by a professor who invented a machine that allowed individuals to speak through the unconscious—a tool that “may be useful to you.”
Earlier than that little bit of magical good luck may even be processed, Dream Raider cuts to a jail cell whose partitions are scribbled with mathematical equations and diagrams. That chamber’s sole inhabitant is Dr. Tian-Li Cheng (Wang Shih-hsien), the creator of “dream raiding know-how” that he now not desires something to do with, since its final use led to the deaths of two individuals near him. Even seeing photos of the mysterious scars on the napes of the 2 ladies’ necks isn’t sufficient to influence Cheng to assist. It does, nevertheless, pique the curiosity of Cheng’s estranged daughter An-Ya (Ellen Wu), an excellent scientist with a PhD in neural engineering and a present analysis give attention to noetic science that goals to unlock the mysteries of human consciousness by way of meditative (vs. mechanical) means. Roughly one second after she turns down Li’s provide, An-Ya is becoming a member of his new crew, which additionally contains Cheng’s former assistant Xie Xiao-Yu (Chung Cheng-Chun), a nerd who has quick eyes for Che Na and who is aware of easy methods to function the dream-raiding machine.
The contraption in query is a crystal-powered The Matrix-style doohickey that makes use of futuristic headdresses and brain-implant plugs to learn electrical impulses and hyperlink individuals’s minds collectively. This isn’t very dissimilar to the equipment featured in Apple TV+’s current South Korean import Dr. Mind, and as soon as Cheng arrives to spherical out Li’s motley crew, it pays immediate dividends, permitting An-Ya and Cheng to concurrently journey contained in the reveries of the comatose lady, the place they’re confronted by the metal mill state of affairs that opened the collection. An-Ya promptly falls beneath no matter spell has the remainder of these ladies strolling to their doom, and he or she’s solely saved by Cheng’s last-second fast pondering—a brush with dying that’s made moreover puzzling by Cheng’s encounter with a mysterious lady in purple who each appears to be in command of this hive-mind dreamscape, and is aware of him personally, stating, “I’m your hidden want.”
Within the overwhelming majority of instances, recounting a lot key data would necessitate an enormous spoiler warning, however Dream Raider handles this and extra in its first half hour alone, rushing by way of twists and turns as if it have been hopped up on amphetamines. To a higher diploma than its derivativeness—which additionally extends to its A Nightmare on Elm Avenue-esque notion that any ache felt within the dreamscape has real-world repercussions, that means a unconscious fatality might lead to an precise one as properly—the present is outlined by its breakneck storytelling. Nearly none of what occurs to Li and firm makes a lick of logical sense, and but by persistently protecting the pedal to the steel, the collection merely and amusingly zips previous one preposterous growth after one other, all whereas sometimes partaking in deliberate humor, most of it having to do with Li’s cycling-loving police division boss.
Typical of Dream Raider’s absurdism is a second-episode bit through which Li and firm should take care of a gaggle of 5 college students who've collectively leaped off the roof of their college. With solely 24 hours to unravel this thriller, Cheng deduces that they want a transportable dream-raider system (as a result of their affected person can’t be moved out of the hospital ICU), sketches up a diagram of mentioned compact machine, after which builds it—all with time to spare! Such nonsense is the order of the day, and it stays prevalent because the newly-minted Dream Raider Particular Process Power stumbles upon subsequent victims whose slumbering brains want invading—all courtesy of a shadowy madman with horrible facial burns who’s seen, briefly snippets, orchestrating his thoughts crimes from an all-white Icelandic lair alongside Cheng’s enigmatic lady in purple.
Becoming for such craziness, Dream Raider’s forged overacts to the hilt, though in a way that means they’re barely hanging on for expensive life to the zigzagging storyline. Directed by Daniel Fu and Simon Hung and executive-produced by Soi Cheang (The Monkey King 2 and 3), the present handles its wilder components with aplomb; a later journey right into a soldiers-battling-aliens dreamscape is suitably immersive and hectic. Extra importantly, although, it does so with a frenzied vitality that means its properly conscious of its personal silliness. By the conclusion of its second installment, Dream Raider has piled on such a wealth of head-spinning bombshells that it’s troublesome to maintain up—suggesting that, someway, the rest of its first season will proceed delivering a bounty of ridiculous riches.