“The Rehearsal” Season 2’s premiere episode title, “Gotta Have Enjoyable,” incorporates a problem inside it. The raison d’être of a comedy sequence is strictly that, to entertain the viewers and present them a enjoyable time, however sequence creator Nathan Fielder acknowledges in voiceover that he has to begin fairly significantly, provided that the subject of the season is security and communication in airplane cockpits. Though the comic diagnoses this roughly 10-minute part of “The Rehearsal” as one with “zero laughs,” the present is slyly disarming what might be a grim montage of airplane crashes, and it’s doing it in a very “The Rehearsal” means.
The HBO present is well-known now for its manufacturing design’s meticulous recreations of real-world places (shoutout to each New York Metropolis’s Alligator Lounge and to Nate’s Lizard Lounge, its state-line-crossing movie set twin). In Season 2’s opening sequence, it seems to be persevering with that pattern with an in depth recreation of a cockpit as a co-pilot (Eric Barron) fails to persuade his pilot (Gregory Gast) to interrupt off a touchdown strategy that feels all improper. A barely jittery digital camera bouncing between shut and medium pictures of the pilots and an earnest, barely mournful rating add to the mounting pressure. That is as critical as any movie would take a airplane crash within the moments earlier than it occurs.
However within the ensuing crash, as flames burst throughout and the pilot’s our bodies go limp, the digital camera within the cockpit finds Fielder, standing in opposition to the conflagration. We see that we’re, in truth, on a soundstage, surrounded by an LED wall; then, in a wider shot, Fielder walks away from the cockpit set. Whether or not or not a viewer laughs for the time being — the inevitable intrusion of Fielder himself into the world he’s created — is between them and God. However this reveal is a masterful evolution of the methods during which “The Rehearsal” complicates our understanding of what we’re watching by displaying us the bogus seams of the way it’s being made.
All through the ensuing montage of airplane crashes that Fielder runs by way of with former Nationwide Transportation Security Board member John Goglia, there’s a really delicate dance between Fielder and Goglia sitting at a lecture desk, recreations of airplane crashes performed dramatically, and moments the place we see Fielder trying into the cockpit set from the soundstage with the LED wall behind him.
It’s not that the stress breaks every time we see Fielder staring down the “pilots” making the communication errors we all know are about to get them killed. The stakes are too excessive for that. However using the LED wall creates a margin of security that Fielder and the filmmaking group can alter, giving us kind of of a realistic-looking atmosphere. “The Rehearsal” can at all times pull out of a dramatic nosedive by displaying Fielder trying on, even when the airplane is about to go down.
In truth, Fielder makes certain to insert himself into nearly the entire crashes’ aftermaths, regularly reminding us that he’s recreating these moments of loss of life and destruction, sustaining the sense that we’re in his world and he’s doing this for a objective. We begin to acknowledge the sample, till by the tip the montage is ready to lower from a primary officer (Jacob Tittl) on an American Airways flight understanding a mistake has been made to the shot of Fielder staring into the cockpit post-crash, LED wall in flames.
That is very canny staging, capturing, and enhancing, in fact, but it surely’s additionally a novel and fascinating use of quantity expertise. Fielder and his filmmaking group are capable of toggle between the LED wall offering lifelike lighting and environments, and the LED wall as an absurd piece of artifice.
In so doing, the filmmakers are capable of maintain us in two tonal areas on the similar time. We’re reassured that Nathan Fielder goes to pop up and reveal the intricate development behind the heightened ‘actuality’ he’s rehearsing in. However we’re additionally primed to take what he’s saying extra significantly than we’d if we have been nonetheless ready on that first chortle.
“The Rehearsal” is now streaming on Max.