‘Sense8’ is murky, though appealing

Tribune News Service

“Sense8,” pronounced “Sensate” – new on Netflix – is the first television series from the Wachowskis, Andrew and Lana, who made the “Matrix” movies, “Cloud Atlas” and “Jupiter Ascending,” among other works of high-flown science fiction. Co-creating co-writer J. Michael Straczynski, whose credits include “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” and “Babylon 5,” is their inside guide to making TV.

The Wachowskis like to think big, and their series, like their movies, is not immune to pretentiousness or ponderousness, nor to a fanatical stylishness that can interpose itself between the viewer and the viewed.

It begins in a ruined church awash in post-production blue light, where Daryl Hannah’s mysterious mother-figure at the end of her rope undergoes a violent transformation, or transformational violence, that ignites the expanded consciousness of the series’ eight main characters. (Ergo: “Sense8.”)

This octet of sympathetic resonators are a Chicago cop (Brian J. Smith), an Icelandic DJ working in London (Tuppence Middleton), an Indian woman unhappily engaged to be married (Tina Desai), a held-back Korean banker (Doona Bae) taking out her frustrations in martial arts, a Nairobi bus driver (Aml Ameen) caring for a sick mother, a transgender blogger in San Francisco (Jamie Clayton), a closeted Mexican movie star (Miguel Angel Silvestre) and a Berlin safecracker (Max Riemelt).

They’re all having dreams and seeing visions; sometimes they see through one another’s eyes. Its closest cousin is probably “Lost,” another epic of mystification whose meanings are murky but whose moments are surely rendered. Naveen Andrews is the sansei of “Sense8.”

It appears headed toward a familiar face-off in which slowly comprehending, initially reluctant heroes must defend themselves against and take down a cold-blooded machine that requires their destruction – a dichotomy that encompasses young versus old and commune versus corporation.

More immediately, it does things that movies do, with practiced efficiency. There are action scenes, there are sex scenes, there are a few scenes in which characters have a more or less regular if brief conversation. There is the reliable chill of spooky entanglement at a distance: a character in Mumbai feels the rain in Berlin, a chicken in Nairobi suddenly appears to a character in Seoul.

It wants to be an experience as much as a story, and for better or worse, it is – mostly better.