Citadel

Personally I thought Citadel was every bit as good as I had hoped it would be but with so many mixed reviews my advice would be to just go watch it for yourself. It's about two spies who loved each other (Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra) but have their memories wiped after their agency was destroyed by a powerful syndicate. It's now 8 years later and they have built their own lives with new identities and no memory of being spies. They then try to get their memories back to help prevent a New World Order from happening. This kind of story has been done numerous times before but Citadel still does it with a fresh new take. Some of it is unbelievable but just turn your mind off and enjoy it for what it is and that's an action packed thriller.

Probably the script was written by ChatGPT. They fed the program with some famous spy movies, took out its soul and that was it. It's worse than shows with one-twentieth of the budget. Where did they put $300 million? And making jokes about another movie doesn't change the fact that it's copy and cliché like when the protagonist's wife says he's not Jason Bourne just to alleviate the plagiarism. The scene where the protagonist goes to retrieve equipment that his enemies have been looking for eight years is embarrassing. My mother going to buy bread at the bakery is more exciting. Boring and copy of the copy of the copy of other movies. Not to mention the numerous plot holes and absurdities. I gave 3 because of the good actors.

From the beginning of the show, it is clear what they were trying to do with the whole story, the concept of the Citadel universe as a whole is great, but it is indeed badly executed. If only they worked on the execution more; as in story telling, how the series of events would run after one another, noticed that there's a lot of flashbacks at wrong points throughout the episodes, and sometimes even too many flashbacks back to back, forgetting sometimes that the series is also taking place in real time. The whole high tech part of the series is also amazing what they tried to accomplish but their ambition was their undoing. This series is capable of being top notch, but the story telling needs refining, while watching you'd feel that the episode is out of place or out of sync with the story, you'd feel that it's missing something. Again more work is needed on execution.

For now, just a big parade of shallow clichés.

Maybe it's an attempt to bring a teenage audience closer to spy genre. The intended audience would then justify the insubstantial plot, the characters' constant explanations of what's going on, the TikTok editing, and an almost cynical lack of engagement with the real world. By the way, do these plots involving nuclear artifacts still make sense? Why don't screenwriters experiment with contexts closer to the experiences of the new generations, such as pesticides, industrial secrets in medicine and food, disputes over geolocation data, etc.? Why not explicitly place industries and their business interests at the center of the story rather than these government agencies with their political overtones?

Boring.

This is an initial review of the first episode of this series.

While this is an intriguing concept in the vein of Jack Ryan/Jason Bourne and the many spy adaptations that have been brought to the big and small screen lately, it fails to live up to the hype.

The first thing that jumped out to me about this series was the cringy-ness of the dialogue and the lazy plot writing. The initial meeting in the trail between the two main characters debuts with very poorly written dialogue that felt like it was trying way too hard to be clever. The action scenes that followed were pretty well executed, but nothing I haven't seen before.

The plot tropes that followed have been seen in a ton of spy movies/series already, it felt like a soft-boiled crowd-sourced spy series where they threw a bunch of heavily-used spy tropes in a blender to make something basic and unimaginative.

The bottom line is that this series has failed to find a unique identity and very much risks being forgotten over time. The action scenes were pretty good but the characters seem to be basic and unmemorable so far. To be fair, it's very early in the series. But unless is seen something unique from a story perspective that captures my attention, I am not going to waste my time watching further. I hope things improve but I'm not optimistic.