Potential Goes Unfulfilled in ‘The UVX’ (Review)

by Blake Weil
Blake Weil
•
May 16, 2019
•
5 min read

The first time I came into contact with Future Proof, I recognized their ambition right away. They’d rented (or somehow otherwise claimed) prime floor space at New York Comic Con, hosting hilarious and melodramatically sinister promotions for their upcoming spectacular, The UVX. Armed guards and an endlessly grinning man who behaved like a robot and looked like a game show host, gave strange sound bites about how the UVX would change entertainment forever. I won a free t-shirt from them that I was told would work as a ticket for entry for The UVX’s premiere in a week. I was curious. Curious enough that I dug into their web site where I quickly fell down the rabbit hole of a bizarre alternate reality game, of which I was seemingly the only participant. After about a night of searching, I was declared “Captain of the LUXKnights,” a sort of corporate honor guard to the in-universe sinister mega-corp LUX that ties all of Future Proof’s productions together.

So I put on my free t-shirt and went to The UVX. Or, at least tried to. T After a number of cancelled performances, when I finally saw the The UVX, it was a mess — a series of in-jokes I felt un-privy to, compounded by a story told in fragments sandwiched between flat humor. Behind it, barely visible, was a movie the audience could mutate by voting on what changes to add to it. The film, “Holme,” was a dull art film parody — and a parody that seemed not particularly well-thought out. This first mounting of the UVX in 2017, sadly, did not live up to the hype set by their amazing marketing team. And satirizing the dullness of a film genre resulted in a satire that was simply…dull.

Still, I stuck with Future Proof and was hopeful they would improve. I had a good time despite some similar issues at last December’s Please Resist Thank You, so when I heard that after a number of productions, they were ready to restage The UVX as a finale to an initial startup season, I was excited. I had seen them trying to iterate and grow; this would be a suitable test of that growth.

While The UVX (2019) is certainly better than the disastrous original, I hate to say that Future Proof continues to fail to live up to its potential. While the concept — a film that audiences can twist with their votes while a strange corporate sci-fi thriller lurks in the background — ,is strong, and their action film parody “Most Dangerous Man” (which is screened as part of The UVX experience) was legitimately funny, the same problems which have plagued Future Proof since the first show had stuck around. The same tech problems, the same sense of not understanding the jokes, and an overwhelming sense that a failure to compromise on vision lead to the production biting off more than they can chew has caused me to lose faith in the Future Proof experiment.

The evening started off promisingly with a deliberately cheesy entrance to the movie theater, which was made up to look like a jungle from the film. We were led past an absurdist gift shop selling such items as $5 vials of “fun liquid and into a faintly sinister “processing” center for all patrons; Future Proof were already displaying their usual brand of corporate horror meets comedy. The pre-show gave me a glimmer of hope that they had managed to fully come into their own.

Once the show and “Most Dangerous Man”started, though, it was a return to form — in a more negative sense. While the audience was instructed to vote on what edits to make to the interactive movie, such as changing the genre or adding shower scenes or musical numbers, the voting technology only worked sporadically on patron’s phones.. Beyond that, the screen would frequently crash into a full Windows Blue Screen of Death. And then, as we hit the climax of the story, supposedly a culmination of all our decisions happening at once, the worst possible thing happened. The screen went ________.

Get Blake Weil’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

SubscribeSubscribe

“We’re sorry, we know we joke a lot about broken technology, but the technology is actually broken. Please stand by.”

With no way to recover our collective choices of the past, the projectionist instead chose a random finale (one of 80 or so permutations, according to promotional materials). This single decision robbed the audience of what little agency we had and tested our patience.

The live segments were somewhat better, in comparison. The evening had a somewhat interesting narrative arc, following the film’s director watching his movie slowly fall apart under corporate control, and raising interesting questions of the difficulties of authorship under mass media constraints. But it would repeatedly fall into frustratingly long segments that too often relied on awkward non sequiturs. Recurring elements of The UVX, such as corporate mascot A1 the Spreadsheet Cell, were seemingly added to the production with actual no purpose. Part of the fun of a shared universe, like the one Marvel has created for film and what Future Proof is attempting to do for immersive theatre, is that decisions and elements feel both shared and significant between shows. Here, they may have existed as Easter eggs, but nothing more important than fan service.

I still think of Future Proof fondly and they have a unique enough vision that the work they put out is never dull. But consistent tech problems and weak execution make me wonder whether Future Proof will be able to deliver in their next season. I would love to see Future Proof step back from high-tech, large scale productions, and try to hone their (admittedly great) ideas on a smaller scale, a scale that is easier to execute upon.