svederen Reviews

Fallout (2024– )

Great production, meager story

[6/10 · 17 April 2024]

I've played Fallout 3, New Vegas and gave up completing Fallout 4, so I'm familiar with the universe, but not a die-hard fan of the franchise.

On the whole, I enjoyed the show. It does a great job of presenting the world I know from the video games, capturing the tone, the art style and even some of the humor that made the games such a great experience. There's an atmosphere to the show that is instantly recognizable to any gamer who spent time in the wasteland. Special effects are quite good, and there's a density to the set design and props that makes the world feel more real and lived in.

Acting ranges from decent to excellent. Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins stand out, and are able to overcome some fairly campy dialogue to deliver performances that are both memorable and fun to watch.

Unfortunately, I feel like the show stumbles with telling a compelling story. There are several instances where the plot develops a little too conveniently. Characters just happen across each other at the exact right time and place for the story to progress, with no explanation given. There are also a couple of writing choices where my suspension of disbelief went right out the window. Most importantly, when I finished episode 8, I still didn't have any idea of what the story was really about. What point were they trying to get across? Why did they make this show in the first place? As with most new media these days, it felt a little like they wanted to make a show around a familiar franchise, and then hired some writers to accomplish that, rather than starting off with a burning desire to tell a Fallout story.

All in all, it's an entertaining watch, but it's not a 10 out of 10 experience as many here seem to suggest. If you moderate your expectations story-wise, you'll have a good time with Fallout.

True Detective: Night Country: Part 6 (2024) Season 4, Episode 6

A passable but underwhelming season.

[6/10 · 20 February 2024]

I'm one of those quirky people who really enjoyed both season 1 and 2 of True Detective. The third season felt too much like a repeat of the first for my taste. Knowing where I stand on those might give you perspective when I say that Night Country stands out to me as the worst season yet.

It's not all bad though, there's a lot to like here. The setting in Alaska is both beautiful and eery. Jodie Foster is a beast and her performance doesn't disappoint. There's a murder mystery, it's freaky and it has a touch of occult undertones. True Detective right? Well, not quite. Night Country lets us down on a number of fronts, as compared to previous installments.

The writing is off. You sense it already in the first episode, when characters engaged in conversation explicitly say things that are clearly for the viewer's benefit. The first two seasons were powerhouses in visual storytelling, and you had to be an observant viewer to piece the plot together. It takes some writing skill to fully utilize the visual nature of the medium, and sadly the writers for season 4 kept holding our hands with awkward, exposition-laden dialogue. They didn't trust that we can use our eyes and make connections on our own.

Alaska IS very beautiful, but the CGI version of it is less so. There are just too many shots where the poor visual effects shattered my suspension of disbelief. From animals that are CGI-rendered well within the uncanny valley, to people standing in what's supposedly a blizzard without a single snowflake landing on coats or skin, to freezing characters with obvious fake breath added on later. These things stack on top of each other and detract from what could have been a compelling visual experience. The audience might not be able to see the green screen, but we can sense its there.

I give it a 6 out of 10, mostly for Jodi Fosters performance, for some impressive sets, and for a passable but underwhelming muder mystery with a bit of a flat finale.

The Witcher (2019– )

How to squander a big opportunity in just five easy steps!

[3/10 · 3 July 2023]

As discerning readers of Andrzej Sapkowski's novels and players of CD Project Red's games will know, The Witcher universe is a rich and sprawling tapestry of interesting characters, deeply emotional plot lines, fantastic creatures and settings, and a uniquely Eastern-Eurpean-flavored take on the fantasy genre. It is an understatement to say that The Witcher-verse is a gold mine for an ambitious live-action show producer.

That also means it takes a special kind of talent to squander this potential in the way Lauren Schmidt Hissrich and her Sapkowski-hating writers managed to do. Following their five easy steps you too can become a failed show-runner, despised by fans across the world!

Step 1: Hire a popular lead actor that is very familiar with the source material. Then promise this actor and all the fans of the source material that you're working on a faithful adaptation of the stories they know and love, all while knowing that you intend to do no such thing. This step is important, because if you don't hype up fans of the original content, they won't be as massively disappointed when you inevitably fail to deliver. It is also important because your lead actor will feel that he has been suckered into a project under false pretenses, and when he tries to correct your flawed writing, you can then accuse him of being toxic towards the women in the workplace (They really did this. To Henry Cavill of all people).

Step 2: Hire writers that actively dislike the source material that your show is based on. This will ensure that your promise of a faithful adaptation cannot possibly be kept. It will also make them more likely to project their own views onto the stories, as required in step 4. (Again, they really did this).

Step 3: Whenever you deviate from the source material, do so in ways that don't add anything new or interesting to the story. Your mantra should be: "Replace the good with the bad". Related to this point, make sure that your deviations are also completely unnessecary - this will help the viewer feel confused about your "contributions" to the story.

Step 4: Shoe-horn as much of your own private politics into the show as possible. People hate being told what to think, so you must do so at every turn. The more your viewers are thinking about real-world politics and current events, the less they're concerned with immersing themselves into the world you're creating. If you can make it really obvious and jarring, they might not even be able to concentrate on the story at all! Win-Win-Win!

Step 5: Never listen to criticism, no matter how well reasoned or constructive it is. When disappointed fans criticize your first season, make sure you have a character breakt he 4th wall in the second season to directly berate and belittle those disappointed fans. When your now thoroughly disaffected lead actor tries to carry the show back on track, stand in his way and make is as difficult as possible for him. This way he will eventually give up and quit.

If you follow these five easy steps, you too can ruin a show, even if you have talented actors, directors, technical staff and tons of money at your disposal!

Evil Dead Rise (2023)

Disturbing and over-the-top in all the right ways

[7/10 · 24 June 2023]

Let me begin by saying that I've watched all the Evil Dead movies and the show. I'm not a die-hard fan, and I don't usually enjoy gory horror, but there's always been something about the franchise that hooked me in.

Whatever it is, Evil Dead Rise has it in spades. We know the concept by now: someone finds a scary book, some words are spoken and suddenly all hell breaks lose. Literally.

Thankfully this movie sets up the premise well enough, without spending too much time telling the audience what we already know. That means more room for character-building before suspense sets in.

There are a couple of noteworthy changes in the formula that make Evil Dead Rise stand out from the earlier films. We're not following a group of college kids in the woods, and Ash is nowhere to be seen. Instead we follow a mother and her three kids, all living in a condemned building in the city. The family dynamic raised the stakes significantly for me, and I found myself caring a lot about what happened to the characters.

This is in no small part to the acting. Alyssa Sutherland gives a great performance as the mother and a downright terrifying performance later in the movie. Nell Fisher did very well for such a young actor. As for the writing, the story is simple and there are a few ham-fisted lines of dialogue here and there, but that's to be expected in this type of movie.

I tip my hat to the special effects team. The deadites have never looked more horrific, and the gruesome details had me peering through my fingers more than once. The creature design is outrageously disturbing.

All in all, I'd recommend this movie to anyone who's looking for a gory and over-the-top horror flick that doesn't take itself too seriously.

Succession (2018–2023)

The missing dimension

[4/10 · 26 May 2023]

On the surface Succession is decent enough. We've got a fairly high production value, acting ranging from good to outstanding, passable writing, and initially the dialogue feels tangible. The characters start off as interesting, if for nothing else because they live and move in circumstances that most of us will never experience. The show dazzles us with a look into a world that is extremely opulent and outrageoulsy decadent.

As we progress, however, the show does become somewhat repetitive. It's the same power struggle, for the same stakes, with the same players back-stabbing each other again and again. In the fourth season stakes are raised as we veer into a US presidential election, but it is still framed from the perspective of the Roy family and their corporate schemes.

For me, the show stumbles primarily on two fronts. Firstly, the main characters are irredeemably awful people. They're vapid, immature, greedy, self-centered, unpleasant and at times outright evil. We can't in good conscience root for any of them to come through, and whenever they do succeed we're left wishing they hadn't.

Secondly, Succession drops the ball on showing the real world consequences of how these terrible characters act. People who are laid off by the hundreds over a Zoom call? Never heard from again. Victims of abuse? A few minutes of screentime in a single episode and then gone forever. Political protestors? Merely faceless sign-holding crowds with no discernable agenda of their own.

It is a major flaw that the story is told exclusively from the point of view of the Roy family and their minions. We only ever learn about their motivations, and everyone else exist simply as pawns or obstacles in the Roy family plots and schemes. This one-two punch of irredeemable main characters, and no external view or opposition that we can empathize with leaves the viewer nowhere to go and no-one to relate to.

It's a shame, because there was potential here to tell a compelling story about power, influence and corruption. We could have had the perspective of DOJ prosecutors, SEC watch-dogs, a corporate whistleblower, laid off employees strugling after being sacked, or any number of servants traumatized by working for the Roys. What we get instead is really just a four seasons long showcase of how awful and decadent rich people can be.

The Witcher: Blood Origin (2022)

Fails on every level.

[2/10 · 30 December 2022]

Full disclosure, I'm an avid fan of the Witcher books and video games. The books establish a wonderful fantasy universe with great interesting and unique characters and a nearly limitless potential for good storytelling, as evidenced particularly by The Witcher 3 and the Thronebreaker games.

This new failed attempt from Netflix at making something of the Witcher-verse doesn't just fail to do justice to the original material though, it fails completely at the basics of making a good show.

There's the campy, cheap looking sets and costumes, creating an overall feel that's not unlike 90's shows such as Xena: Warrior Princess, or Hercules. I'm not saying those were bad shows, but they were low-cost productions, and they knew it, so they didn't take themselves too seriously. With Blood Origin, we have the same sense of watching a cheap show, but with none of the charm or warmth of those 90's titles.

Netflix didn't just skimp on the sets and costumes though, they clearly didn't want to pay for decent visual effects either. Remember the poor visuals in the first Witcher season, with the golden dragon looking more like an overgrown chicken? This show is even worse than that. I've seen visual effects on amateur YouTube fan-productions.

When it comes to acting. It's not outright horrible, but it's clearly second rate, the kind you expect to find in a B-movie. There was not a single moment where a performance was able to elicit a genuine emotional response from me. Not once did I feel sad, happy, relieved or afraid for the characters. This isn't entirely the actors' fault though, because the wooden dialogue they're given doesn't help in this regard.

All of the above could be forgiven, if at least the show had a solid story, but once again Netflix proves that they're incapable of writing a good Witcher tale. The story we do get is convoluted, at times outright non-sensical, and it's thrown at the viewer haphazardly with little regard for pacing. Most of the time It feels as though they're just setting up a narrative excuse for the next badly choreographed fight scene to break out, and when it inevitably does we have no emotional investment in the outcome.

Whether or not you're a fan of the Witcher universe, there's nothing here but a soulless cash grab. It's not worth your time.

The Sandman (2022– )

Truly great!

[9/10 · 6 August 2022]

I'm a big Neil Gaiman fan, and have read pretty much every book he's ever published. I've been ambivalent about the screen adaptations of his works, Stardust was excellent, while American Gods was decent, but felt like a missed opportunity to make something truly great.

The Sandman does not squander that opportunity. It's built quite faithfully around the story that Gaiman wrote, with some notable but to my mind quite permissible and often interesting deviations. It's a bit of a wild ride, but so were the comics, and you'll have to leave your disbelief at the door if you want to fully enjoy the adventures of The Dream King.

Visually the show is committed to Gaiman's extraordinary imagination, and at times the sheer spectacle of it all is reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's Dr. Parnassus. It's obvious that NetFlix didn't spare any expense on special effects or CGI. They also didn't hold back in the darker parts of the story, which I appreciated greatly. The Sandman has some outright terrifying (and sometimes very gory and violent) scenes. This show is not for the squeamish.

Casting was well done, and I particularly enjoyed the picks for both Morpheus and the Lightbringer. I was delighted to find Patton Oswald in there, as well as the always fantastic Stephen Fry, albeit his role is a minor one.

If you like fantasy and the things that grow out of uninhibited imaginations, please don't cheat yourself out The Sandman. Once you're done with the series, I also heartily recommend the comic books.

Arcane (2021– )

Not just for fans of the video game

[9/10 · 7 November 2021]

Arcane tells the story of two young orphaned sisters, growing up and getting into trouble in the dual city of Zaun and Piltover.

The series is based on the video game League of Legends, and although it drops you right into this fictional world, the necessary time and care is taken to set up places and characters in a commendable show-don't-tell fashion. Solid character development and world building means it's an entirely enjoyable watch without knowing anything about the game.

The animation is outright exquisite. As an anime fan, I found the animation in Arcane to be leagues beyond anything I've ever seen from an animated series before. There is an incredible attention to detail. It's clear that no artistic talent or monetary expense was spared in bringing the world of Runeterra to life.

Great soundtrack, great acting and a compelling story that doesn't pull any punches when it comes to violence and more adult themes.

So far only the first three episodes have been released, and I can't wait to see what else they have in store for us!

Lovecraft Country (2020)

Decent elements that don't add up to something good.

[5/10 · 12 September 2020]

Made it through the fourth episode, but I don't think I'll be going any further with this show.

Lovecraft Country is a show that attempts to be too much at the same time, and consequently falls flat in several areas. We start out getting a compelling, if a little pointed, look at Jim Crow America through the eyes of a black family from Chicago. The characters are interesting, the dialogue well written and the acting is above a standard HBO show. The show also does an admirable job transitioning into a slow building story about a mystery inheritance that has all the trappings of good Lovecraft.

Then suddenly and without warning everything goes down hill. The slow pacing, atmosphere and drama is replaced with cheap CGI monsters and nonsensical plot lines that will seriously strain your ability to suspend disbelief. While there is an overarching narrative that loosely tries to tie the episodes together, we find ourselves watching a drama in one episode, a tacky monster horror flick the next, a half-decent ghost story the third and a weird Indiana Jones meets National Treasure clone in the fourth.

The constant genre hopping left me both confused and wishing that they had stuck to a more consistent approach.

I should note that I have no problem that they're taking liberties with Lovecraft's universe, and no issue with the political side of the show. In fact those parts are probably where it is strongest.

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014)

An old, tried and tested story in new shiny packaging.

[3/10 · 6 May 2015]

I watched Kingsman without any prior knowledge of the film, and without having seen the trailer, and as such my expectations were reasonably low. Because of that I didn't walk away disappointed, but at the same time I feel that there at least two serious things wrong with this movie: 1. Samuel L. Jackson's performance is painful to watch. It's 'Snakes on a Plane' bad, maybe even worse. His lisp is forced and unnatural, and it constantly makes you wonder if it's some kind of stab at gay men.

2. A young, rough around the edges character gets picked up by a secret agency to replace an older agent, has to go through some training, and then has to try and save the world? Where have I heard this before? Men in Black? Wanted? Any number of other films? It's old goods in a new packaging.

Warning, some pretty major spoilers below: 3. Suspension of disbelief fails. The action scenes are pretty and well done, and I could accept the hyper-violence at face value, as something that occurs in this comic book universe that the film works in, but it drops the ball on so many other important areas. First of all there's no adequate explanation of how or why the protagonist goes from street kid to bad-ass super spy.

We're simply expected to believe that being dipped in water and jumping out of a plane, somehow trains you to be able to take on 50 men armed with machine guns, and come out unscathed. Then we're expected to believe that biometric security systems are impenetrable to hacking. If it involves a scan of your hand, it can never be hacked into apparently. Or how about that brilliant billionaire villain, who is determined to carry out his plan, but designs his doomsday device so that it only works as long as he's physically pushing a button on it. He can't flip a switch, it has to be pushed continuously, giving the hero ample opportunity to stop the event. It's the antithesis of Veidt in the Watchmen.

Where suspension of disbelief died completely for me, was when the villain explained how he convinced state leaders, presidents, royalty and celebrities to join cause with him. His solution to global warming is to cull most of the world's population, and somehow these leaders of the world are all in agreement and support his plan? The whole film they're building up to this event, this massive catastrophe that will occur at the hands of Jackson's character, and you're expecting something really clever, a twist or a turn or some rationale that would justify world leaders going on board with this insane plan, and then Jackson spouts a few lines of weird Malthusian-extremist rhetoric, in that weird lisp of his, and that's that. No adequate explanation is ever given.

I didn't believe any of these things made sense, even within the film's hyper-violent cartoon universe. It felt like they were so busy making all those violent action scenes, nobody stopped to think... hey is this even making sense?

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)

Peter Jackson's Jar-Jar-Binks disaster.

[4/10 · 29 December 2014]

I'm not a fanatical fan of either the books or the Middle Earth universe in general, but I've read the LoTR trilogy and the Hobbit, and I've enjoyed Jackson's adaptations in all the five film so far. That sadly ended with "Battle of the Five Armies".

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what's gone wrong in BoTFA, as there are just so many different areas where it falls short of what we've come to expect from the series. There's been plenty of reviews here on direction, pacing, writing, etc, so I'll focus on two points where I the film really broke for me. The absolute worst was how the film shoves comic relief in your face throughout, to a degree where it actually feels like the serious scenes are "serious relief" in a comedy. A badly written and not really all that funny comedy that is.

To that end, Alfrid Lickspittle is Jackson's Jar-Jar Binks. I get it, he's an unsympathetic character. I realized that the first time we saw him in Desolation, but somehow Jackson figured we needed 12-15 more scenes with the guy, really driving home that point, all of them attempting at humor and all of them failing miserably.

Then there's the 45 minute long battle scene, with the now obligatory god-ninja-elves defeating hundreds of orcs without breaking a sweat. It's gotten so bad that it's really hard to be scared of the orcs anymore, and it's indicative of a major problem in the movie.

Orcs have become such obvious cannon-fodder, that their armies never really feel like a threat, or even a force to be reckoned with. Don't get me wrong, Azog is pretty bad-ass, and so is his second in command, but the rest of the orcs seem to die if anyone just looks at them sternly. At one point there's a young boy with no battle training, looks to be no more than 12 years old, taking out two heavily armored Uruk Hai sized orcs in five seconds, with a couple of swings of a sword.

Between the god-like ninja-elves and the trying-to-be-hilarious-but-also-god-like dwarven fighters, the orc armies are just a minor nuisance, that are ultimately dispersed and killed by a few of the ever present eagles that seem to show up every time someone needs to have their day saved.

I couldn't enjoy the narrative, because it was broken, riddled with bad humor and full of plot holes. I couldn't enjoy the character development because there wasn't one, and it was very difficult to enjoy the combat scenes, because of these weakling orcs.

In the end, I have to give it 4 stars for Bilbo's acting and for Christopher Lee kicking ass at Dol Guldur.

Odd Thomas (2013)

A little Odd, but quite good.

[7/10 · 16 July 2013]

This film is quite a little gem. Solid acting, decent special effects and an interesting plot. I read the book a few years ago, and while I enjoyed it, it was one of those read and throw away titles, so I didn't expect much from the movie, but I was pleasantly surprised by how well it turned out.

I liked some of the references to the book as well, such as the cardboard cut-out of Elvis that Odd keeps in his bedroom.

If / when you go see Odd Thomas, don't expect fantastic drama or mind- blowing effects, as this is a relatively small movie on those fronts, but if you can enjoy a suspenseful and quirky film that doesn't look like every run-of-the-mill Hollywood production out there, then I heartily recommend it.