Michael Cera Saves Humanity In Surprise Steven Soderbergh Series Command Z

Does Steven Soderbergh ever sleep? I can distinctly remember a time when Soderbergh announced he was retiring, only to then return and make one new project after another. Hell, he has a new Max series — "Full Circle" — that just started streaming this week. And I'm not complaining — I love Soderbergh's work, and I love when he isn't afraid to get experimental. And that seems to be what he's doing with "Command Z," a new movie/series/mystery project that will be streaming exclusively on Soderbergh's website. 

The project is a futuristic (well, sort of) comedy about a trio of travelers using wormholes to go back in time. What year are they going back to? Why, 2023, of course. Michael Cera leads the series as ... a giant talking head giving orders via a screen. He might have more to do than that, but based on the trailer — which we can't embed, sorry, you gotta watch it on Soderbergh's site — that's what Cera is doing here. 

So what is "Command Z"? According to an email announcing the project, it's "about ninety minutes long." Sounds like a movie, right? Wrong! As the copy continues, "there are eight episodes of varying length, so is it an actual series or just a movie cut up into pieces?" Good question. As the trailer above shows, "Command Z" features three characters from the future being given orders by a mysterious figure played by Michael Cera. As Cera puts it, "This is historic, literally. You'll be dipping into the past to make some critical fixes there that will in turn make the future, our present, right now, more livable, fair, and decent for everyone." Sounds good, right? As it turns out, the "past" that the characters are headed to is our present, 2023, which Cera calls "America's last inflection point."

This isn't your normal movie time travel, though. No one is jumping in a time machine and showing up physically in the past. Instead, using a wormhole housed inside of a dryer (a really high-end dryer), the characters are able to jump into the minds of people from 2023, looking out through their eyes like characters in "Being John Malkovich." Thus the stage is set for our travelers to alter the past and save the future. Or something like that.

I'll confess that some of the humor in the trailer fell flat for me. But hey, this is a new Steven Soderbergh project we're talking about here, so I'm definitely going to check it out. You can check it out, too, when it drops on Soderbergh's site on July 17, 2023.