Like his brief turn in “Ghostbusters,” it makes you eager to see him keep branching out beyond Thor. There’s even an incredible dance sequence to Roxy Music’s “More Than This” that is perhaps on par with Oscar Isaac and Sonoya Mizuno’s “Ex Machina” moves. It’s quite a good role for Hemsworth, who excels at being charming with an undercurrent of mania. The writers have turned Abnesti into a more blatant eccentric, a visionary pharma/tech genius who makes grand speeches about the perks of life in Spiderhead and the virtuousness of the experiments while also sampling his own product on the side. Jeff is played by Miles Teller (who also worked with Kosinski on “Top Gun: Maverick” and the underseen firefighter drama “Only the Brave”) and Abnesti is taken on by Chris Hemsworth, who also produced. They went with dystopian brutalism plopped in the middle of a tropical paradise. Director Joseph Kosinski and his team, including cinematographer Claudio Miranda (who also teamed with him on “Top Gun: Maverick”) further had to dream up an entire look for Spiderhead, too. Screenwriters Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese (“Deadpool”) needed to make many big choices and leaps to stretch it out to feature-length: They added backstories, love interests and flashbacks.
You have to admire the ambition behind those who had the idea to adapt the story. The audience experiences the world through one of the inmates, Jeff, who is starting to question the tests, the drugs and the mysterious leader of the facility, Abnesti, who keeps an open-door policy in the Spiderhead to foster trust and respect with the prisoners. Originally published in The New Yorker in 2010, “Escape from Spiderhead” is about a group of prisoners living in a specialized facility who are being subjected to experimental mood-altering drugs, with names like Verbaluce, which makes you speak eloquently, and Darkenfloxx, which makes you feel about as badly as a person can feel. But stranger things have worked for the streamer and who doesn’t like a slick, dystopian sci-fi? So it’s an especially bold leap to use it as the inspiration for a starry, big budget, Netflix-subscriber-driving event movie, as they've done with “ Spiderhead,” which starts streaming Friday. It’s the kind of subtly unsettling work - stark, moody and dialogue heavy - that could easily be a play or a haunting experimental film. George Saunders’ short story “Escape from Spiderhead” is not, you might say, an obviously cinematic piece.