Slate is concerned that Amazon’s Utopia is letting the cat out of the bag in full view of the public:
A group of comic book fans discover an unpublished manuscript for a graphic novel that they believe holds clues about the future, shadowy forces are also looking for the same manuscript, and eventually the comic book fans uncover a global conspiracy. So far, so run-of-the-mill.
But the nature of that conspiracy plays very differently in 2020 than it did in 2013, and the results are catastrophic.As the characters discover, the reason the comic book contains clues to things that haven’t yet happened is that it was drawn by one of the architects of a plan designed to stave off planetary collapse as the population rises and fossil fuels run out. Here’s the plan:
- Convince the general public that there is an outbreak of a deadly new virus. To sell the story, poison or otherwise kill people, then attribute their deaths to the phony virus.
- Once the fake pandemic is up and running and the public is terrified, announce that there is a vaccine that can defeat the virus.
- With the help of global elites, NGOs, and world governments, inject everyone on the planet with this “vaccine” as quickly as possible.
- Surprise! The vaccine is designed to permanently sterilize all or all but a certain percentage of the people who take it. Sit back and relax as the global population drops from 7.8 billion to about 500 million in a single generation, ushering in a new era of plenty.
You can probably see the problem here, and it’s an insurmountable one. We are in the middle of an actual pandemic, a staggering number of Americans sincerely believe that that pandemic is a politically motivated hoax, and an equally staggering number believed vaccines were harmful years before COVID-19 emerged. It’s not the filmmakers’ fault we’re in this mess, it’s not their fault so much of the public is superstitious and gullible, and it won’t be their fault if Utopia gives some dumbass the confidence they need to quit wearing a mask and infect and kill you or the people you care about. Make whatever art you like—the audience isn’t your problem! But if you’ve made something about a scrappy group of kids uncovering a giant conspiracy, and it turns out that in the time since you finished shooting, that exact conspiracy theory has suddenly revealed itself to be a) believed by a significant portion of the population and b) deadly, it might not be a bad idea to push the release date.
Conspiracy Theory is just a name for the reality that the Promethean establishment doesn’t want you to know about. If the story didn’t reflect what was actually happening, they wouldn’t care if you saw it or not.