This particular vision of The Peripheral has chosen, for some reason, to nuke the book’s most incisive social and cultural features and replace it with a tepid extension of the Westworld formula to presenting artificial life: a shallow, cosmetic exploration of lifeless dolls onto which we can project our hopes, dreams, and desires.
It is truly difficult to escape the Westworld comparisons while watching The Peripheral - with the flat-affect monologues and serene androids, it’s more of an extension of Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s world than a heartfelt adaptation of Gibson’s. Flynne, deliberately a reticent, voyeuristic character in the book to underscore the larger themes at play, becomes a much more conventional, proactive heroine on screen, which makes sense if you’re playing to Westworld fans tuning into to see a new Dolores type making her way toward self-empowerment. Several key characters get absorbed and combined into one. Wilf, originally a charming alcoholic mess of a publicist, gets downgraded to a generic fixer character who just sort of exists on the periphery of the rich and powerful. He goes all in on the trends and cultural crutches we use to prop up our withered attention spans, and to this end, the book is packed with some truly awesome trainwrecks, like self-absorbed artists doing poorly thought-out stunts in spectacularly bad scenarios. In the book, Gibson does a great job exploring celebrity and power and the delicate work of managing optics in a post-social media world - the complex art of seeing, watching, being seen, and being watched. As with all adaptations, The Peripheral comes with changes unfortunately, in this case, they’re to the detriment of the story.
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