Mr. Robot - Trailer from nobody on Vimeo.
The opening first episode starts with a V.O-sequense on black screen of someone talking to an imaginary person. It then cuts to a group of people, still V.O, and then a close up showing half of Elliot's face, revealing that it was his voice we heard.
Elliot works as a security engineer at the cyber security company Allsafe. He's constantly suffering from social anxiety disorder, clinical depression and dissociative identity, having his thought process heavily influenced by paranoia and delusion. Elliot connects to people by hacking them, including his co-workers, therapist and drug-dealer. One day he is being recruited by a guy called 'Mr Robot', the leader of a hacker group called 'fsociety' who plans to make a digital revolution by deleting all debt records.
The series takes place in modern time New York City, film locations including Silvercup Studios, Coney Island and Times Square. Everything is made quite dark, but at the same time as realistic as possible, from the offices where they're working in, the clothes they're wearing to the software and the hacking itself. In the making of the series Esmail consulted experts and real hackers to be able to give a realistic picture of hacking activities.
The cinematography in Mr Robot is very interesting as Tod Campbell (dop) does not follow the "normal" rules of framing, but instead uses different techniques to evoke the characters feeling of anxiety and marginalization in a society that is very robot/machine-like.
In the series the characters are often placed at the very bottom of the frame, which leaves them with a lot of headroom which echoes their isolation, making them small, powerless and suggests the great weight hanging over their head. Campbell also chose to do a lot of of-kilter angles to represent the way Elliot views the world and using "shortsighting", positioning the character's faces at the edge of the frame closest to the person they're talking to to make them seem more alone.According to Campbell, Elliot's eyes had a big influence on which lenses he decided to use. Since Elliot has such big eyes he decided to use Cooke S5s which rounder than other lenses and accentuate curves, helping to sculpt the face a bit more.
The sound design in the series is very good and well implemented. There are subtle sounds which you don't realise you're hearing until it stops and electronic score which underlines a dark, paranoid and tense mood. Both of these brings the audience into the dark mindset of the main character Elliot in a remarkable way.
Sam Esmail took a lot of inspiration for the series from other films and series such as 'Fight Club', 'Taxi Driver', 'The Matrix', 'A Clockwork Orange' and 'V for Vendetta', but he takes the portrait of cyber-crime, corporate power and anarchist hackers into new, unexpected directions. According to Esmail most of the inspiration for the main character Elliot, together with some ideas for the plot, came from 'Fight Club'. In episode 9 in season 1 when Elliot initiates the hack Sam Esmail decided to ply the song "Where is my mind". That is the same song that David Fincher used to underscore the climax of 'Fight Club' and is in Mr Robot intended as a message to the audience to make them aware of the inspiration they took from the film.
The reason why I like the series is both because I find the cinematography "new" and interesting and because I find the story very well written. The series is very relevant as people only becomes more and more aware of how much power small, rich groups in the society have together with how the fear of hacking only becomes bigger and bigger. I also like how realistic the series are. It's not based on the writer's fantasy. The programs and the tech-talk are real and the problems Elliot encounter while hacking is realistic. It's one of those rare shows that treats its audience with intelligence and respect, and even when the writers gives away a long awaited answer, they never pretend that the solution is everything.
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