If being online constantly has hacked away at our attention spans, commissioning the future-shock pic’n’mix Love Death & Robots seems like a smart move by Netflix. This is prestige TV in convenient pill form: a sprawling anthology of 18 animated shorts that run at an average of just 12 minutes, lashed together by a prominent David Fincher producing credit.

After Se7en, Fight Club and even Netflix’s own compromised House of Cards, the Fincher imprimatur remains shorthand for scowling grittiness and artful nihilism. It is hardly surprising, then, that a high percentage of Love Death and Robots is self-consciously NSFW. The suggested opener Sonnie’s Edge – a brutal tale of gladiatorial bloodsport using mind-controlled aliens – drops its first C-bomb in the opening minutes and blithely uses violent sexual assault as a plot point.

Elsewhere, excessive blood spatter and casual nudity are shorthand for maturity, even if the more X-rated Love Death & Robots episodes are rarely as transgressive as they imagine themselves to be. Hectic chase thriller The Witness is visually the most exciting thing here, with a frazzled aesthetic similar to the recent Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, but the story screeches to a halt for a scuzzy striptease that feels lurid and pointless. If cyberpunk stories about harassed exotic dancers and distressed sexbots are supposed to be state-of-the-art science-fiction, then an R2 #MeToo moment seems long overdue.

Ongoing leaps in computer-generated imaging and motion-capture mean that animated models can now seem uncannily human, allowing film-makers to mimic epic sci-fi blockbusters on a minimal budget with robustly effective results. The stripped-back Helping Hand condenses the stomach-churning zero-G astro-peril of Gravity into 10 shockingly effective minutes. The violent but sentimental Lucky 13 is a Starship Troopers-style war story starring an eerie CG likeness of Samira Wiley, whose engaging performance elevates some boilerplate plotting. Similarly, the space truckers in Beyond the Aquila Rift help ground what is a satisfyingly wicked psychological horror set in the furthest reaches of the cosmos; despite just being strings of ones and zeroes, their panic seems plausible.

Violent but sentimental ... a Samira Wiley-alike in Lucky 13. Photograph: Netflix

These impressive technical showcases will be deserved highlights of someone’s animation showreel someday, but it is the shorts that steer in the opposite direction of gritted-teeth cyber-realism that are generally more enjoyable. Post-apocalyptic tale Three Robots follows a trio of cute droids on a sightseeing trip through a shattered late capitalist world, proving yet again that you can get plenty of comedy mileage out of an inflectionless cyborg voice. Meanwhile the distinctively cel-shaded Fish Night steers its stranded travelling salesmen into a phantasmagoric dreamscape that is as much fantasy as sci-fi.

Sixteen films in (if you make it there), Love Death & Robots even relaxes its strict animated criteria for Ice Age, allowing film stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Topher Grace to react to a dazzling miniature civilisation in their vintage fridge, a cheery late palate-cleanser in a collection that veers heavily toward the dystopian. Seeing actual humans is a welcome jolt, but it makes you realise how few genuine surprises there are elsewhere.

A dazzling miniature civilisation ... Love, Death & Robots. Photograph: Netflix

Taken as a whole, it is a sci-fi pot pourri that benefits from a dip-and-skip approach. While every short is well-executed, bingeing them in quick succession dulls rather than sharpens their impact. Fincher might be the eye-grabbing name but perhaps his fellow headline producer Tim Miller – who created the S&M opening sequence to Fincher’s 2011 adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – holds the real key to Love Death and Robots. Miller’s gleefully profane and violent proof-of-concept short film featuring Deadpool was a springboard to directing what became a $780 million-grossing blockbuster and franchise-starter. Perhaps some lucky Love Death and Robots alumnus will follow in his footsteps and do the same.

Love Death & Robots is on Netflix now.