The story the Alex Rider team have chosen to take on for the show’s first season, which mostly comes from the second book of the series, Point Blanc, finds Alex (Otto Farrant) on a mission to embed himself at a mysterious boarding school for troubled, ultra-wealthy youths. (That the soundtrack is excellent definitely helps.)Īnd when I say tension, I mean tension. And while that much seriousness has the tendency to drag lesser adult action series to an absolute standstill, the hyper-realistic teen antics Alex and his tiny circle of friends get up to, even in the midst of life-or-death situations, serve as useful tonal ballast that lends the series just enough warmth and humor to bolster the rest of the story’s inherent tension. ![]() So what that its reluctant spy hero is a teenage boy? The show takes him seriously, which means their fictional version of the SAS takes him seriously, which means the deeply realistic bad guys out to literally kill him also take him seriously. More of a piece with what Teen TV has become in in the last decade-slick, serious, cinematic and mature, with a strong bent towards internationalism and diversity-it’s the kind of spy drama you can recommend indiscriminately to your adult friends. This newest take on Alex Rider is something entirely different. A blockbuster cast, sure-yes, that is Bill Nighy you spot, and Ewan MacGregor, and Alicia Silverstone, and Stephen Fry, and Missi Pyle-but the only thing any of them are there for is a goofy good time. And that, for better or worse, is exactly what fans got in 2006, with the daffy, Alex Pettyfer-starring film, Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker. Gameboy geiger counters? That’s straight-up Spy Kids territory, my friends. As far as adaptations might go, never mind The Bourne Identity. Slick as the series’ eponymous hero is, after all, he still got his start as a Y2K-era teen spy whose missions generally hinged on how many grappling hook yo-yos, tubes of metal-dissolving zit cream, and diamond-edged buzzsaw Discmen he could cram into his pockets. Swap out a few key details, though-the SAS for the CIA South African white supremacists for the KGB-and it could just as easily have set the stage for teen spy drama Alex Rider, now on the free streaming service IMDbTV.įor anyone familiar with Anthony Horowitz’s long-running YA series of the same name, this might be surprising. This is the opening of Treadstone, the deadly serious spy series USA Network spun off from The Bourne Identity in 2019. “During the Cold War, both the CIA and KGB experimented with mind control, hypnosis, and drug therapies to create the ultimate human weapon: assets capable of carrying out the most extreme covert operations, no matter how morally ambiguous.”
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