Review of Godflame

See: Godflame (2019)
Season 1, Episode 1
1/10
The dumbest, most embarrassing thing I've ever seen.
18 February 2024
This has got to be the dumbest, most embarrassing thing I've ever seen. Where do I begin? Watching these actors crawl around, pretending to be blind, while executing fight scenes... speaking in tongues, as if humanity forgot how to speak English, simply because their eyes don't work. It's insulting to the blind to suggest that if we all lost our sight we'd speak like savages. When they do speak "normally" they use terms like "sun grave" instead of sunset, or "the coming of the water" instead of "my water just broke"... I mean, I was rolling my eyes and laughing at this nonsense only thirty seconds into the first episode. I'm am so second-hand embarrassed for the people who wrote this drivel.

Really. Someone manages to throw a rope around someone else's neck with perfect precision (on the first attempt mind you) and no one accidentally stabs the wrong person in a violent attack? Can they smell each other? Is that how they know who to kill and who not to kill in a mob full of blind people?

Don't even get me started on blind characters who make perfectly symmetrical, color-blocked clothing, adorned with perfectly symmetrical embellishments THAT NO ONE CAN EVEN SEE. Or the guy who someone found two matching feathers of the exact same size, shape, color, and affixed them so perfectly to his hat with the plumage and pattern in the right direction. Why is it necessary? Why is the queen wearing impressive, embellished crowns THAT NO ONE CAN EVEN SEE? Why are they applying war paint to their faces THAT NO ONE CAN EVEN SEE? Who are you trying to intimidate? No one can see you!

I have no words for the queen's "prayer". I consider myself a pretty raunchy person when it comes to my sense of humor, but that display was gratuitous and nasty. It was there purely for shock factor and it was just as trite and embarrassing as the rest of this trainwreck.

For all those who say the concept is so original... it's not. The plot is straight ripped from a Portuguese novel called "Blindness", which was adapted into a film starring Julianne Moore in 2008. It depicts a rapidly spreading virus which turns people blind, and how society collapses as a result. Granted these showrunners have taken it much farther... but it feels like they watched "Blindess" and decided to run with the idea. And poorly at that. "Blindness" was itself poorly executed as far as I'm concerned, which doesn't say much for the way that authors handle the concept.

For a show about blind people, they sure do a lot of flourishing, campy nonsense and have Jason Momoa do "cool stuff" for the camera. I felt like I was watching a really bad acting class pretend to be blind for an hour, and they came up with some really cliché, borderline offensive content. To me, this contained a whole lot of cheesy ideas that were strung together by even cheesier writers. Honestly, it makes The Fast and the Furious look like stellar, Oscar-worthy material.
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