If the premise of 2017’s Future Man strikes you as familiar, congratulations – you’re set for three seasons of getting the joke.
The story begins with a lowly janitor, Josh Futturman, a gamer-by-night still living at home and in an emotional proximity to his parents that’s way too close. He’s in his bedroom, celebrating victory over Biotic Wars – a video game considered unbeatable – in the most lonely and intimate of adolescent ways when two visitors suddenly appear. They are purple-haired Tiger and her offsider, Wolf, and Josh recognises them as the sewer-dwelling rebel leaders from the game.
Turns out the wars are real, dangerous “biotic” clones have taken over the future and the video game is a recruiting tool sent back in time. Tiger and Wolf are time travelling to locate present-day warriors who might aid their rebel quest to head off the historical events that made the wars inevitable. Does Josh want in? Um, sort of.
You may recognise the “recruited by a video game” trope if you love 1984 movie The Last Starfighter, the now-cult teen classic about a trailer park loser whose expertise at an arcade game sees him recruited to an alien space fleet and saving the galaxy. And if time-travelling, underground warrior-rebels reaching into the timeline to stop a war against humanity reminds you of everything you enjoyed about The Terminator, or Twelve Monkeys, The Matrix or Army of Darkness, you are in for a real treat.
The creators of Future Man are Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, and every fabulous moment of Future Man is really about how much they love those kind of movies, too. It comes as little surprise to discover that Rogen is one of many directors who have tried (and, alas, failed) to get the rights to a Starfighter remake.
He and Goldberg are, of course, the friends-since-high-school duo whose own collaborations include dirty pleasure movies like Superbad and Pineapple Express. If you don’t enjoy the humour of blowjobs in toilets, mass-shitting events, post-apocalyptic group sex and brain-stem masturbation among genre-movie references, buff warriors and explosions, Future Man will not appeal.
Like its bright visual palette – and a design that summons nostalgia for 80s movies that may not even exist – smut infuses Future Man at every opportunity. The swearing is heavy, sex is everywhere and cum jokes abound. Indeed, the target of Tiger and Wolf’s mission to alter the past includes the assassination of a scientist who invents the Biotics in an attempt to cure his own herpes.
Like other Rogen/Goldberg outings, the laughs come from revealing just how many taboos remain even in our liberal, progressive society. Don’t believe me? In Future Man, going back in time to murder a baby is a plot point. Someone’s mum goes topless. Jesus gets laid.
What makes it so engaging is that the same lack of restraint that powers the gags allows for plotting that, in a television-land overrun with formula, follows the rhythm of characters instead. They are entirely prepared to run riot over time and space, leaping into and out of an unpredictable array of locations and, sometimes, eating cat burritos on the way.
This kind of story madness is only sustainable with a cast that finds enough energy in their characters to compete with the pace of events. For this reason, Josh Hutcherson is an inspired choice as Futturman. As one of the stars of the Hunger Games franchise, and featuring in trashy film fun like Zathura and the recent remake of Red Dawn, Hutcherson has the genre-riffic sensibility to maintain a breathless sense of adventure. Whether he’s trying to moondance in a spacesuit at a black college party, crawling through a room full of dead bodies or trying to adjust to life on a beetroot farm, he’s channelling the kind of tender mania of the unwitting-hero type that defined Michael J Fox and Jason Bateman at their teen movie peak.
He’s well complemented by actor-comedian Eliza Coupe, whose brutal deadpanning as the battle-hardened Tiger lands punchline after punchline, while Derek Wilson’s commitment to his hilariously unhinged boofhead Wolf provides clowning of extraordinary muscularity, even without the cocaine pipe in his bum.
Cameos abound. The grown-up kid from the Sixth Sense plays a scientist, as does one of the station crew from John Carpenter’s The Thing. The appearance of screen veterans Ed Begley Jr and the much-mourned Glenn Headly as Futturman’s parents elevates the proceedings with an unexpected poignancy – Headly died of a sudden pulmonary embolism while the show was filming. It was one of her last roles.
This is not TV sci-fi where gentle reason triumphs over chaos – there is no Doctor Who or Captain Picard to set a dangerous universe back in order. Future Man is instead a mad, silly riff on genre tropes. It’s orchestrated peril that glories in the profound non-logic of the form. In these strange, chaotic times in which we live, that in itself is something of a balm.
• Future Man is available to stream on SBS On Demand
