Apparently they wanted to do something like 'Neo-Tokyo', or 'Heavy Metal', or 'Memories', but whatever weird cultural conditions that made those movies possible are long, long gone. Instead, this is very, very fancy CGI with writing that ranges from below-average to cringey. A lot of one-dimensional characters, a lot of jokes that don't land, a lot of extremely old science-fiction cliches exhumed and presented with as little enthusiasm as possible.
The constant attempts at edginess in 'Love, Death And Robots' are offset by the fact that all of the stories are older than Poodle Skirts. No amount of CGI titty is going to cover the fact that they're selling young people watered-down versions of stories that were written before sitcom married couples slept in separate beds.
I want to say that this is an example of style over substance, but those old anthologies managed to be cool in spite of or because of style over substance. Besides 'Love, Death and Robots' isn't really that stylish, in spite of the top-notch CGI. I kept going 'Wow, that CGI is marginally better than CGI from two years ago!', then getting quickly bored of scenes that were basically visually uninteresting. I have no idea what kind of decision-making process lead to such a poorly-executed project.
I read this once as a child and once in my thirties. Both times it was like a punch in the face. But a happy punch in the face. Even knowing the outline of the story, there's a sense of tension and fear hidden in the details that I've never experienced in any other book. The philosophical themes are subtle and unpretentious, and tangle themselves effortlessly into the frighting sense of vastness and emptiness and time. Maybe the best proof there is that a book can be short and sweet and part of a low-brow genre and still blow most fine literature out of the water.
