I'm sad to see this in a form of 5 episode series compared to a 100 minute movie.
They went our of their way on the music, even the acting of the main young protagonist was superb, considering the fact this is her first acting performance. Especially when considering the fact how badly the character 'Adam' was played by his actor.
I also applaud their bravery of inviting a music video cinematographer to shoot this, most scenes look amazing, the location choice was great and varying.
Where it doesn't shine, are all the dialogues, which are non-sensical, feature a lot of story exposition, and a 4 to 5 times repeating during the course of the series (we get the same information multiple times). Also a very weak point is the story itself. All the "modern" references are written from the point of a middle-aged cat woman. Basically the whole story is done that way, but it is especially noticable there.
The VFX is two fold: The effects done by professionals, and what's supposedly their in-house team: you can clearly see the quality in the former, and the jarringness in the latter.
My review will be as scattered as this series' storyline, so sorry in advance for it.
I didn't get the decision of dubbing over the actors, they should've just "admitted" it and roll with their casting decision. I'd much rather read subtitles of the one Hungarian actor and let Slovaks speak Slovak, Czechs speak Czech. The dubbing company handled the excessive dubbing the best they could, and I see the good intentions, however the final result misses out on the very authentic voices of the quality part of the cast. The dubbing of 'Kocis' was useless, since his assistant spoke Slovak. His voice is signature, and it didn't go through. Same applies to 'Cinkota' and 'Marcinková', they'd have sounded much better with their own voices, but that's my subjective opinion.
The character of 'Adam' has great potential, since he can do more than we first think, but the handling of that revelation, and the "black & white" sides of the character are poorly executed.
Lots and lots of scenes felt like they were filling runtime with stuff that barely, sometimes not at all, needed to be shown on screen, and it only enforced the redundancy of the whole story.
There's one beautiful scene that clearly shows the relationship between our main protagonists, but the moment they use exposition, not once, not twice, but thrice to be sure we absolutely understand it explicitly personally ruined the whole point of showing it visually in the first place, or being an important information at all.
This repeats for most of the plot twists. A great idea, with poor execution, and exposé by characters multiple times...
Makes it hard to watch circa after the first 10 minutes of the first episode.
We were given one actually funny moment, and it's in the last episode.
In the 3 hours and 45 minutes this monstrosity has in total, you'd expect at least 5 more moments like this.
I waited to see the whole series before reviewing, but I cannot recommend anyone spending their time and money (Voyo is a paid OTT/VOD service) having to sit this through. 1/5 for me.
I'd love to see done better next time. Don't be too keen on series, CME. Finance a movie or two once in a while. I still won't let go the thought of this being rewritten and remade into a movie. Loved the concept of an exclusive series for the platform, but TV broadcast would probably help out the viewership of this, it's of comparable quality.
