Thriller Tyranny Proves the Possibility of Low-Budget Sci-Fi

Before we understand where we’re going, we have to know where we’ve been — and why we know what’s going to happen. That seems to be the premise, anyway, behind the so-far intriguing sci-fi thriller Tyranny, which premiered last week on Koldcast.

Tyranny is slow to start thanks to an extended prologue/credits sequence, but after a minute or so we get down to business. Opening in Prague in the year 2011, we meet Daniel McCarthy (John Beck Hofman), whose use of technology to get a glimpse of the future has made him an outcast, the leader of a rebellion and a prisoner of Dr. Malik (Enrico Piazza).

Trying to sort out the credits on Tyranny might give you a bit of a headache, as the official site makes a big deal about how the series is the unfinished work of McCarthy, who “disappeared” in 2009, but had left behind enough raw footage for his friend Max to assemble. (In truth, Hofman, who is uncredited as the series star, is also its creator.)

This sort of deceit is admirable for trying to play with the concept of narrative online, not to mention introducing a potential ARG element. Unfortunately, that “backstory” doesn’t correspond at all with the actual series, which is conventionally filmed like fiction — did Daniel use a three-camera set-up to capture video of Dr. Malik’s interrogation? The approach would make sense were the show a lonelygirl15-style vlog drama, but doesn’t match with the series as it stands. Daniel’s journals, which track a filmmaker’s career and his excitement about Tyranny as an upcoming feature film, only add to the confusion.

However, the genius of setting your show in the extremely not-too-distant future is that it’s usually not too hard to pull off the look, visually — production design doesn’t require too much alteration from a modern look in order to be believable. And Tyranny is one of those shows that looks great despite clearly not being a massive production, with many locations feeling found rather than constructed and minimal yet effective touches of world-building. The effect is similar to other relatively low-budget thrillers with sci-fi twists, such as the complex indie favorite Primer — proof that you don’t need a lot of money to tell a story in this genre.

Tyranny is taking the web series to feature film approach, pinning its hopes for distribution on how the series performs. And for a project that has a lot of feature film DNA, it’s pretty well-structured episodically. However, it’s very hard to get a sense of how Daniel’s claims that he’s the leader of an underground resistance movement connect with the actual narrative so far, which is taking its sweet time to unfurl.

In the three episodes provided for review, the focus is on Daniel’s experiments with the human brain – how the world began crumbling, and whether Daniel could have done anything to stop it, are the show’s big unanswered questions. Audiences eagerly needing answers may find their patience tried.

Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): By The Numbers: Budget Analysis of a Web Series

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