Black Knight review – imagine your Ocado driver is Mad Max and you’re not far off

May 13, 2023 | 16:15:48

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the bad news first. A comet collided with Earth forty years ago, eradicating 99% of humanity and turning the Korean Peninsula into a desert. Did Kim Jong-un and your preferred K-pop stars make it out alive? At the moment, we are in the dark. Even former supporters of Piers Corbyn wear oxygen masks outside due to the air quality. Our hero, a courier by the name of 5-8 (played by former runway model Kim Woo-bin), brings food and oxygen to the survivors trapped in dreary concrete new-builds built on a grid system resembling Milton Keynes but without the charm and roundabouts. 5-8 must pass through cleansing air locks at each property in order to obtain signatures for parcels, displaying a commitment that, in my experience, is unmatched by DPD or Amazon Prime.

Black Knight may sound like the newest installment in the Wakanda sub-franchise of the Marvel Comics Universe, but it is actually an adaptation of a Korean webtoon about a counterintuitive dystopia in which the futuristic homologs of Parcelforce are hot, brave, and never throw your package in the trash. In contrast to the protagonist of Ken Loach’s 2019 film criticizing exploitative courier employment practices, characters 5-8 don’t leave notes apologizing for missing them. Why? Because everyone is always at home playing video games that recreate the sunny, green world before the comet hit or working out on a treadmill while donning headsets that make users think they’re jogging through green parks, 5-8 never misses anyone. The living must enviously wish they were dead in this post-apocalyptic wasteland.

The good news is that All of the survivors are stunning and have fantastic haircuts. It almost seems as though a higher civilization sent the comet to wipe out ugly people and put an end to the mullet revival. What a blessing it was that the comet missed so many hair and makeup artists! Never allow Suella Braverman to watch this program. It would inspire her. Three social strata—general, specific, and core—are recognized in post-apocalyptic Korea. Security goons with wrist-mounted scanners use the QR codes to identify which class each person belongs to.

The Cheonmyeong Group, a cabal of cravat-clad architects and political lackeys, is at the top of society and is constructing gated communities with consistent oxygen supplies. Their clientele is affluent, who are guarded by security personnel who follow shoot-to-kill riff-raff policies that aren’t yet in effect even in London’s most upscale new construction. In the opening episode, a refugee named Sa-Wol, an irresponsible teen brat, attempts to realize his dream of following in the footsteps of 5-8. When handsome 5-8 enters the airlock with his consignment of fresh produce, chiseled good looks, and dreamy eyes that would melt the polar ice caps, Sa-sister Wol’s Seul-ah suddenly becomes overly giddy. The politics of sexuality are anything but futuristic.

Black Knight review Seol-ah, who is confusingly not Seul-ah but a mature military intelligence cop with quick hands and camouflage fatigues, is the only strong female character so far. She’ll probably get together with 5-8 when they both rebel against the cravat wearers in, oh, episode six when they both go rogue.

The Last of Us, Sweet Tooth, and reruns of Westworld and The Walking Dead are just a few of the post-apocalyptic TV dramas that are available to us today. These shows may have been produced at the request of our useless overlords to convince us that the dystopia we currently live in is not all that bad. The much more compelling Silo, which is currently available on Apple TV+, is based on the existence of human survivors in an underground silo, including Rebecca Ferguson, Rashida Jones, and David Oyelowo.