The Witcher: El origen de la sangre

I hate giving out bad reviews to TV shows or franchises that I've enjoyed watching in the past. It always perplexes me on how they can take something good and successful and ruin it. I hate to see good franchises flop, in the end we the viewers suffer. I have nothing against a lead female character. Some of my favorite TV shows and movies have lead female characters. Unfortunately, when it comes to certain genres and franchises that changes. This felt forced, I don't like any of the characters so far, male or female. The action sequences are from the 1980s, the acting is not very good. I see very little hope now for The Witcher franchise.

My wife and I are ardent fans of The Witcher series. Sadly this prequel was not of the same caliber as the main series.

Firstly I should note that the actress who plays the dwarf character (Francesca Mills) was great. When she's in a scene everything works. The other actors felt mostly miscast -- in part since everyone looked different and has different accents. Nothing felt natural.

As for the story, I expect that I missed a lot since the writing was absent of the cleverness that I had come to expect; some ensembles just work, this one didn't.

We watched the 4 episodes in one sitting. At the end we were pleased that it was kept to only 4. At the end I was left with a mild headache and no interest in more. Easily forgetable. And as one reviewer noted, this series is very reminescent of the "Wheel of Time" series, similar feel and characters that felt miscast, yet even that series was better than this.

I actually surprisingly felt like all of the casting had some great acting potential, but there is basically zero character development in this show -- it's almost as if a 40 episode series were condensed into a very long YouTube summary/recap video, and all of the development is narrated out to you... like Netflix didn't really want to spend the time/money on a complete show, but someone in the studio thought it'd be really cool to squeeze this prequel in before the next season of the Witcher, to give the audience some background: all while producing something with room for literally every single woke trope under the sun! Kind of hilarious if you think about it.

The show actually might have been better done as an animated series, and honestly, a lot of the tone of the show struck similar to some recent shows like Vox Machina and Dragon Age. And a pretty decent Witcher animated movie does already exist anyway.

Overall though, I've seen worse unfortunately; probably isn't so bad if you maybe wanted to put it on in the corner of your screen while getting some other work done. Basically could serve as a podcast with some decent action scenes worth tuning in to scattered throughout 🤷‍♂️

So we have the long awaited 6 part series - oh wait it was so bad Netflix already had to cut 2 episodes worth from it, so let's try that again, - the long awaited 4 part The Witcher "spin off / Prequel". Let's start by saying if they cut bad writing / acting / storytelling away to the tune of 2 episodes, and we are left with these 4 barely watchable episodes that in my opinion should have been cut down to 1 single !short! Movie (i am not sure i found 90 minutes worth of good enough scenes in the whole 4 episodes, so a cut down to somewhere around 65 mins would have been probably somewhat reasonable), So lets take a look at what we have besides bad acting, writing that would be cringe worthy in a high school production, and obviously in todays adaption is only "inspired" by the source material. The Casting choices were questionable in many cases and the miscasting might be what lead me to state that the acting was bad before , but to be honest i think it is a mix of both. If you loved the Witcher lore in the games and / or in the books, you will undoubtedly be disheartened by this sad attempt and if this is a sign of what's to come, it does not bode well for the main show once Cavill is gone.

Honestly, there's very, very little to like her. The plot is paperthin, so are the characters. The dialogue is horrible, things happen randomly without explanation and build up making basically everything it tries fall flat. All these backstories of the characters are laid out but nothing feels distinct or unique because there's a huge overlap in their backgrounds. There's also far too little time to even get to know and care for these characters. Even with 4 episodes it feels drawn out in the parts that don't matter and too rushed in parts that do matter. This all is not even mentioning the fact it's tied to The Witcher brand, in which case they've thrown out the little bit of information they could've used for these events, it's all horribly inconsistent with what's already established for no apparent reason other than to be different.

On a positive note, ignoring how well it fits The Witcher, the cinematography looks decent, the action is snappy and Meldorf is kinda funny.

It just baffles me how this show even came to release knowing it had to pass multiple sets of eyes for approval at several stages in it's development.