fuelrod
Joined Jun 2006
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Reviews6
fuelrod's rating
A French-Belgian cop show where all crime stories involve occult or mystic plot lines, and sometimes imply, but never turns into supernatural solutions.
Most of the ideas behind the episode plots are actual quite good and deserved better elaboration, but the execution and show running are burden with so many flaws: the conclusion must be a grade below average.
The limited success and pick up of the show outside French and Benelux is therefore understandable taken the fierce competition on the tv and streaming market into consideration: there is a lot of better shows out there.
To go in-depth with a variety of the flaws:
1) If you want to make feature film long episodes or justify double episodes per plotline, you can't wast too much time on transportation and "mood shots". I have never seen a cop show spending so much time showing cops driving cars or people walking around, showing landscapes, rural villages or administrative buildings, showing faces or looks between people. Yes, scenes like this can create the setting, moods and atmosphere of a story, but the use in this show is so excessive. It becomes fill and plaster dragging out the plot to the point of irritation.
2) Perhaps it's a French humourist act in an otherwise very dark and serious show, but I don't get it and it feels very odd: Most of the secondary characters in each episode are portrayed like caricatures or burlesques. Every stereotype or prejudices you could hold upon a farmer, doctor, clerk, worker, executive, priest, administrator, foreigner, teenager, ect, are confirmed and exaggerated. Most gendarmes with dialogue in the show are like characters in a Asterix comic. It's an consistently anachronism throughout the show that makes it a lot less credible, and most times just interfere the story trief to be told.
3) There are only two main characters appearing throughout all of the show, but you never get under the skin of them. Some of the time spend on the mood shots mentioned first could have been used to elaborate on or develop the characters, but it doesn't happen. There's a small fling related the to female protagonist and her past and son, but it turns out only to serve as the plot background for the season 2 finale episodes. I never get to know or to care about the main characters, what happens to them, wether or how they solve a case or not.
So, you got at show where don't care about the protagonists. You don't care about the victims because they are rarely anything but dead corpses, rarely introduced as persons/humans. The one thing left to care about are the vilians, and some of them are featured with compelling background stories. But still, it's hard to care or feel sorry for lunatics butchering others in sadistic ways.
4) The storytelling and editing are abruptly and full of micro plot holes. Each storyline features a lot of characters, and phenomenons that are explained/explorated, so there's a lot to keep track of. Sometimes I had to ask myself if I had fallen asleep during an episode, because I didn't get how the plot had moved from one key to another. But when rewinding I could conclude that I didn't fall asleep: the intermediate conclusions were simply missing, as like some scenes had been edited or cut down, or the writers just jumped to conclusions the lazy way. Again, time wasted on countless mood and senic shots could have been used to close some of these small plot holes making the storylines coherent.
5) When you build stories with heavy elements of mystery and occultism, and want to keep the setting and storytelling serious, you need to keep everything else straight and tight. You can't make your protagonists do outrightly stupid acts, or try to spice up the drama with contradictory character jumps. When you do so it becomes ridiculous. Like other reviews mention such major plot holes do take place in the show, making some episodes cringe to watch and make you ask yourself: Do I want to wast time watching the next episode?
Most of the ideas behind the episode plots are actual quite good and deserved better elaboration, but the execution and show running are burden with so many flaws: the conclusion must be a grade below average.
The limited success and pick up of the show outside French and Benelux is therefore understandable taken the fierce competition on the tv and streaming market into consideration: there is a lot of better shows out there.
To go in-depth with a variety of the flaws:
1) If you want to make feature film long episodes or justify double episodes per plotline, you can't wast too much time on transportation and "mood shots". I have never seen a cop show spending so much time showing cops driving cars or people walking around, showing landscapes, rural villages or administrative buildings, showing faces or looks between people. Yes, scenes like this can create the setting, moods and atmosphere of a story, but the use in this show is so excessive. It becomes fill and plaster dragging out the plot to the point of irritation.
2) Perhaps it's a French humourist act in an otherwise very dark and serious show, but I don't get it and it feels very odd: Most of the secondary characters in each episode are portrayed like caricatures or burlesques. Every stereotype or prejudices you could hold upon a farmer, doctor, clerk, worker, executive, priest, administrator, foreigner, teenager, ect, are confirmed and exaggerated. Most gendarmes with dialogue in the show are like characters in a Asterix comic. It's an consistently anachronism throughout the show that makes it a lot less credible, and most times just interfere the story trief to be told.
3) There are only two main characters appearing throughout all of the show, but you never get under the skin of them. Some of the time spend on the mood shots mentioned first could have been used to elaborate on or develop the characters, but it doesn't happen. There's a small fling related the to female protagonist and her past and son, but it turns out only to serve as the plot background for the season 2 finale episodes. I never get to know or to care about the main characters, what happens to them, wether or how they solve a case or not.
So, you got at show where don't care about the protagonists. You don't care about the victims because they are rarely anything but dead corpses, rarely introduced as persons/humans. The one thing left to care about are the vilians, and some of them are featured with compelling background stories. But still, it's hard to care or feel sorry for lunatics butchering others in sadistic ways.
4) The storytelling and editing are abruptly and full of micro plot holes. Each storyline features a lot of characters, and phenomenons that are explained/explorated, so there's a lot to keep track of. Sometimes I had to ask myself if I had fallen asleep during an episode, because I didn't get how the plot had moved from one key to another. But when rewinding I could conclude that I didn't fall asleep: the intermediate conclusions were simply missing, as like some scenes had been edited or cut down, or the writers just jumped to conclusions the lazy way. Again, time wasted on countless mood and senic shots could have been used to close some of these small plot holes making the storylines coherent.
5) When you build stories with heavy elements of mystery and occultism, and want to keep the setting and storytelling serious, you need to keep everything else straight and tight. You can't make your protagonists do outrightly stupid acts, or try to spice up the drama with contradictory character jumps. When you do so it becomes ridiculous. Like other reviews mention such major plot holes do take place in the show, making some episodes cringe to watch and make you ask yourself: Do I want to wast time watching the next episode?
It can be put short: If you have seen the original Swedish version don't waste your time watching this one.
Forget all the talk about "this is not a remake - this is a new adaptation". If you hear or read somebody state that, they only prove they have not seen Arcel & Oplev's version because this American try out is most of all a scene by scene remake - even many of the locations are the same! The pro of Finchers version is the performance of Rooney Mara. It is very close to match Rapaces international breakthrough.
The no. 1 con is Finchers total lack of adding anything new or original to this remake. The only major contributions Fincher brings to the table is a fat and slick visual style, and a rude Hollywood simplification of the storyline presented in both the novel and the original movie adaptation.
I rate 5/10 - a simplified copy cat of a (only) two years old movie... what a waste!
Forget all the talk about "this is not a remake - this is a new adaptation". If you hear or read somebody state that, they only prove they have not seen Arcel & Oplev's version because this American try out is most of all a scene by scene remake - even many of the locations are the same! The pro of Finchers version is the performance of Rooney Mara. It is very close to match Rapaces international breakthrough.
The no. 1 con is Finchers total lack of adding anything new or original to this remake. The only major contributions Fincher brings to the table is a fat and slick visual style, and a rude Hollywood simplification of the storyline presented in both the novel and the original movie adaptation.
I rate 5/10 - a simplified copy cat of a (only) two years old movie... what a waste!
First - I have not read the book, so I'm not one of these hardcore but also biased Millinium fans.
2 1/2 hour is far to long for this movie. Especially when it takes almost 3/4 hour before the plot starts to roll, and the plot pushing mystery is solved 1/2 hour before the end credits - I and the others in the cinema did a lot clock checking during this show...
I don't have the exact numbers but I'll guess this is serial killer movie no. 427, and it's serial killer movie no. 423 where quotes from the Bible are a (or THE) major key in solving the riddle - To put it nice the murder plot was a perfect cliché and so predictable it almost became a joke.
The movie introduces a lot of characters but all except one are through the movie presented as shells and not persons we get to know and therefore understand. The exception is the Lisbeth character but the portrait of her insists on her being so mystique that she ends up being an impersonal caricature.
The conclusion is that the movie is a standard Scandinavian socio-thriller very suitable for a 1 1/2 hour TV-show in the style of Beck or Wallander. As a cinematic movie it's mediocre - to long, to full of clichés, character building to flat & impersonal and the plot to predicable.
2 1/2 hour is far to long for this movie. Especially when it takes almost 3/4 hour before the plot starts to roll, and the plot pushing mystery is solved 1/2 hour before the end credits - I and the others in the cinema did a lot clock checking during this show...
I don't have the exact numbers but I'll guess this is serial killer movie no. 427, and it's serial killer movie no. 423 where quotes from the Bible are a (or THE) major key in solving the riddle - To put it nice the murder plot was a perfect cliché and so predictable it almost became a joke.
The movie introduces a lot of characters but all except one are through the movie presented as shells and not persons we get to know and therefore understand. The exception is the Lisbeth character but the portrait of her insists on her being so mystique that she ends up being an impersonal caricature.
The conclusion is that the movie is a standard Scandinavian socio-thriller very suitable for a 1 1/2 hour TV-show in the style of Beck or Wallander. As a cinematic movie it's mediocre - to long, to full of clichés, character building to flat & impersonal and the plot to predicable.