Duncan Jones established himself as one of the most interesting and talented young filmmakers in the industry out of the gate, but the disappointing reception to Netflix’s dystopian sci-fi Mute saw his hot streak come to a crushing end, and it’s frustratingly now been half a decade since he last helmed a feature.
Moon was a stunning debut that announced a singular new voice, with the atmospherically isolated cosmic tragedy winning rave reviews from critics and audiences alike. He followed it up with Source Code, another rapturously-received box office success that easily ranks as one of the best time loop movies there’s ever been, before he got bitten by the blockbuster bug.
Warcraft may have failed to turn a profit in theaters, but it still ranks as the single highest-grossing video game adaptation of all-time, so a win is still a win. Mute, meanwhile, found itself bludgeoned almost to death by comparisons to Blade Runner, with a 21 percent Rotten Tomatoes score underlining that Jones had missed a step for the very first time.
Even now, criticisms of the star-studded crime caper haven’t dampened, with a Reddit thread currently attempting to pick through the wreckage to see where it all went wrong. As fate would have it, the top-voted comment simply and straightforwardly explains that the reason it crashed and burned when it landed on Netflix was because “it’s dreadful.”
Regardless, we can’t wait to see Jones step back behind the camera whenever that may be, but Mute marked one of just many examples of how the near-limitless creative freedom provided by Netflix isn’t always a good thing.