radhrh

I don't understand why this movie is getting so much praise. It's not a long movie, only 95 minutes but it seems so much longer. Nothing much happens for the first 40 of those minutes and then when the action starts it's very stop go stop. Brief firefights with unseen enemies punctuated by standing around talking on the radio trying to organise a rescue like ordering an Uber. At no point did I feel tension, fear, exhilaration or even mild entertainment. And then it's finished, nothing more to say.

So we have science fiction mystery thriller with a solid cast, high production values and based on a best selling trilogy of books. What's not to like? Unfortunately the devil is in the detail, and there's a heck of a lot of detail of fit in making it intimidating right from the get go. It's very dense with many characters being introduced all at once along with a choppy narrative which jumps from post war China to present day UK which makes it difficult to follow. This isn't relaxing entertainment by any measure and after the first episode I was exhausted by it all, it just seems like a lot of hard work, a chore to watch and I can't help thinking that a more stripped down adaptation would have been better.

I never played the game but I was interested in the concept of a campie retro futuristic action adventure set in a post apocalyptic world. To be honest I was impressed by the first couple of episodes with the knowingly sly black humour however the show devolves into a confusing fractured mess. There are entirely too many interconnected plot lines that the show loses focus and by episode 4 I was using the fast forward button to skip sections I wasn't so engaged with like the goings on in the vault. It would have been better to devote an entire episode to a single character instead of constantly jumping around and when I realised there were 17 episodes I checked out for good.