Kimera Underground Park isn't a place you can tell stories about. You only see it against the light, on a cutting-edge screen. It's a bunker 275 meters below sea level, the nuclear shelter featured in the Spanish dystopian series of the same name, recently released on Netflix.
A luxury bunker, of course. For a select few (how dystopian and how much is news?). Inside, time bends like the ground around it, while outside the surface ignites and crumbles. An underground resort where billionaires isolate themselves from the chaos of a possible nuclear war. They walk the glossy corridors, but with the same tense air of those who already feel trapped.
A (stylised) face, maybe a predefined smile, and that's already too much.
Masks fall in the atomic, or rather nuclear, shelter: like our society
The nuclear shelter promises protection from the horrors outside, but then the first technical problem opens a gap between the dull life of the bunker and the radioactive nightmare outside. The news from the surface is equally searing: radiation, unbearable temperatures, scorched earth. Unease sets in, the psyche falters.
The rules imposed by Minerva, the shelter's strict manager, are beginning to crack. Finding themselves forced into the same space, caught between secrets and unresolved pain, hurts more than the burning world.
And security becomes prison.
Control and chaos, the fine line of post-truth
We saw it in "Silo," we saw it in "Fallout." And in "Wayward Pines," and in who knows how many other audiovisual works. Big Brother, locking us in a bubble and manipulating our view of the world.
And as in other cases, behind gilded corridors and carefully crafted protocols, something sooner or later goes awry. The nuclear shelter is a microcosm where privilege imposes a fragile order. Inside, power crumbles under the pressure of tensions exploding among the super-rich who have purchased their safe haven, and now find themselves segregated and frightened. Distant from the real world, but not from their human nature, made of mistakes and internal violence, a bit like the chaos that reigns above.
While the apocalypse threatens them outside, a new war erupts inside: the war of perceptions. In the nuclear shelter, information is manipulated, truth fades under the veil of post-truth. Virtual twins created with AI and distorted reality are no longer just behind a screen, but are now part of every relationship.
The fragile substitutability of the self
This series is no longer just about bombs or physical protection. It delves into the depths of what makes us human or replaceable. In a world where identities can be digitally replicated and memories can be shaped, the individual becomes interchangeable, a piece of data to be archived alongside millions of others.
Max, the rich young protagonist (also rich in contradictions), represents the desperate struggle for authenticity in a scenario that tends to crush personal history under the banality of survival.
Our very lives, this series seems to tell us, have become the more or less gilded prison of those who now look at themselves more on the screen than in the mirror. And it's a disturbing view, to the point that some people... he hated this series. I am not one of them.
“The atomic shelter”, a thought left in the bunker
The nuclear shelter is both a trap and a refuge. Certainly, a place where the certainty of those in command ends and the fragility of those searching within begins. Technology and control are not enough to contain the deepest ghosts: fear, hatred, loneliness. Perhaps the true refuge, or the true condemnation, is the time suspended between the announced end and the desire to reemerge.
Highly recommended.
