One true thing to say about Netflix’s perfectly decent alien-invasion series “The Eternaut”: It’s not bad, but you really should read the book first. If you can find a copy, that is.
I discovered “El Eternauta,” a bit of pulp perfection published as a comic strip in Argentina beginning in 1957, when Fantagraphics Books put it out as a deluxe graphic novel in 2015 (the first time it was translated into English). The beautifully packaged volume cost $50, so I got mine from the library.
Jump to this year, when Netflix announced its live-action “Eternaut” adaptation and I went looking for the book again. Already out of print, it was now $350 a copy from online resellers. And in a no doubt related development, the New York Public Library no longer had any on its shelves.
(A Fantagraphics representative said that a reissue is being considered but no decision has been made.) English-only readers unwilling to drop $350 for a used copy are out of luck.
That scarcity is surely a sign of the hold “El Eternauta” can exert on eager imaginations. Written by Héctor Germán Oesterheld with artwork by Francisco Solano López, the comic takes place in a Buenos Aires hit by a sudden, mysterious snowfall that kills people on contact, dropping them where they stand. Some friends gathered for a card game survive, holed up in their host’s house, and gradually devise ways to go out into the snow to obtain supplies and increasingly alarming information.
Oesterheld’s ingenuity and Solano López’s deceptively simple, darkly expressive drawing and shading produce a science-fiction horror tale of rare distinctiveness. As the survivors venture out and scramble back, the images oscillate between nervous claustrophobia and eerie, wide-open desolation; between the overly familiar and the radically strange. In the underwater breathing gear the heroes adapt into survival suits, they look like divers slowly navigating a dry, deadly sea.
“El Eternauta” became a classic of Argentine pop culture, helped by the transformation of Oesterheld, a committed leftist whose work grew more openly political over time, into a secular saint. Having joined a guerrilla group opposed to one of the country’s succession of military dictatorships, he was kidnapped in 1977 and never found, joining his four daughters among the desaparecidos.
Over the years, high-profile Argentine and Spanish directors like Adolfo Aristarain and Álex de la Iglesia have talked about adapting “El Eternauta”; the two-time Palme d’Or nominee Lucrecia Martel spent more than a year working on a script. Oesterheld himself was involved with an animated television series that didn’t pan out.
The winner, finally, was Bruno Stagnaro, whose six-episode series for Netflix (it premiered Wednesday) met the Oesterheld family requirements of being Spanish-language and Buenos Aires-set.
“The Eternaut” (in Spanish, with subtitles, or dubbed) has been updated to the cellphone age, and the core cast of characters has been expanded, but it follows the rough outlines of Oesterheld’s story. Toxic snow falls, though now with the aural accompaniment of constant wind, a different kind of ghostliness than the silence of reading. Keeping every inch of the body covered, in coats or ponchos or plastic sheets, is crucial. Giant bugs make an appearance.
This fidelity is easier to maintain than it would be if the season were longer; the six episodes end at about the point where the book turns a corner into full-fledged, eyebrow-raising pulp with a particular flavor of anti-Cold War, a-pox-on-both-your-houses idealism. A second season of the series might have to work a little harder to keep contemporary viewers from tuning out.
Stagnaro, who created and directed the series and was one of five writers, has done a very creditable job. He and his director of photography, Gastón Girod, give the snowy cityscapes full of dead bodies and dead vehicles a hushed beauty. The action is legible, though the face and body coverings can sometimes cause momentary confusion. (Sometimes that’s a dramatic device.)
Stagnaro has made one major concession to contemporary preferences, and while you can’t blame him — he’s just doing what every streaming adaptation does — it’s a choice that makes the series more ordinary than it needs to be.
He has taken a story about a small band of people with a few simple personality quirks each and added layer upon layer of melodramatic detail and mystery — “humanizing” the characters, which means turning a slightly kitschy action-horror story with philosophical underpinnings into something that’s at least 50 percent tasteful soap opera. Less “War of the Worlds,” more “The Last of Us.” This is the predominant strategy of television drama today, and it’s harder to do well than people want to admit, which is a big reason that so many drama series feel the same.
I have not said much about the concrete details of the plot of “The Eternaut,” largely in deference to Netflix, which provided a do-not-spoil list of such sweeping comprehensiveness that it sapped my spirit. (You didn’t hear anything about bugs from me.) It was suggested that only one actor should be identified with a character, the Argentine star Ricardo Darín, who plays Juan Salvo, a leader of the survivors. So there he is. He’s good.
The first question you might have about the show is one that I’m definitely not allowed to answer: What, or who, is an eternaut? The book, with its semi-Victorian structure, gives you the answer right away. (I wasn’t supposed to tell you that, either.) The series doesn’t, so you’ll just have to wait. Or spend the $350.
Mike Hale is a television critic for The Times. He also writes about online video, film and media.
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