Review of Queen

Queen (II) (2019– )
5/10
The creators had the courage to be realistic but lacked the imagination to make it impactful.
2 March 2021
Don't go by the overall ratings here, 170 of the 200 ratings here are manufactured by some ratings factory... all with a 10/10 rating... all with clearly robot generated usernames and the same title "queen". You can filter all the 10/10 ratings and scroll to see what I'm saying. So effectively there are only about 30 real ratings and they are not that great.

I watched the Tamil-English version of the series which seems to be the original version. All the other versions are at least partially dubbed. If you choose to do so, watch only the Tamil-English version as the dubbing in the other versions is pathetic. I started watching the Tamil version and had to quickly run and search for the original version.

Quite a realistic bit of storytelling. The larger than life characters have been humanised. We have seen these characters only in black and white but this series presents them in reasonably realistic shades of grey. Of course there is some level of dramatisation and idolatry of the protagonist. If nothing else, this series shows why Jayalalitha became what she became. Bad parenting followed by a series of betrayals throughout her life made her insecure and she grew a gigantic ego as a defense mechanism.

The series is quite difficult to watch because of two things. The first and foremost is the excruciatingly slow pace. This should've been a 6 part series and has been stretched to 11 parts. I'm grateful that this is a web series where I have the option to hit the forward button to skip. Without that option, I'd have stopped watching it after the 1st episode. The only thing that made me push on was an eagerness to see a realistic angle to the life of Jayalalitha.

The second aspect that makes it difficult to watch is the drab dialogue delivery. The dialogue scripting and delivery both are quite dull and puts you to sleep. You can keep the dialogues realistic without making them sound like a docudrama extempore. Many of the dialogues are deep and philosophical fitting the tumultuous life of Jayalalitha but a large volume of them seem unnecessary and at times repetitive.

Overall, it's a sad missed opportunity. The creators had the courage to be realistic with the potentially controversial story but lacked the imagination to make it impactful.
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