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Reviews
Solar Opposites (2020)
Seasons 1-3 is where I'll stay
Season 4.
Very obviously British Korvo is just wrong. The guy off Downton Abbey cannot deliver a joke. He isn't funny. It doesn't matter how many C bombs F bombs M bombs he uses. They aren't a substitute for a sense of humour. You do eventually need a joke. Did Korvo Seasons 1-3 swear this much?
I'd like to say the other actors remain solid but the writing is now off.
And just in case it's important, I'm British.
There are some very good British comedians, without doubt. But that doesn't mean they will all excel in awesome US shows. Please keep them away from Solar Opposites and while I'm here Rick and Morty. David Mitchell, we're looking at you. Knights of the Sun.......
Actually I take it back, just had to listen to the hat song off 'The Birth-A-Day Present.' The British aren't the problem.
But they aren't making it better. And once again, I'm British.
The Way (2024)
Great cast. Who were given the impossible.
This had potential. Incredible cast who've all done better.
But here asked to work miracles with a script dashed off for an election year.
The story it aspires to is done better by 'The Day after Tomorrow' and 'The Way we live now.'
Same themes but 'the way' can never achieve the escape velocity needed to do the same.
Does Michael Sheen really believe such anti Welsh sentiment is just under the surface of every English person? Why are all the English all portrayed as truly awful people? Some of whom find out about the chaos next door when their swingers party can't get porn but only a Carry On film.
Seriously, what the hell was even that supposed to be?
The welshfinder?
This is pantomime.
Once BBC drama was powerful acting. Work which stands the test of time.
And this US movie trope of 'every body must have huge emotional outbursts and arguments must have everyone shouting incoherently at once.'
These scenes do not convey emotion. They convey cringe.
It probably is there to appeal to a US market?
And how on earth did Adam Curtis debase himself with this absurdity?
The best characters. The MP and the Chinese steel plant owner. They are given the dignity of being filmed walking away.
Masters of the Air (2024)
4 of 9 episodes in, It isn't BoB
There is something off. BoB really made you remember the characters. This doesn't. Why not?
Episode 3 was the Schweinfurt-Regensburg raid. Why not make the ENTIRE episode about that? We're over Belgium for a bit. Then, who knows where we are? Audiences cannot really appreciate the scale of the losses or the absolute devastation to the bombing fleet. Remember in BoB in the church scene where Easy Company listens to the children singing? Characters who have died are shown as there but vanish as Winters lists them off. We could see what had happened and take stock. With MOTA we are left clueless as to what the Schweinfurt-Regensburg raid did.
Indeed, you're left thinking 'just another day at the office.'
Episode 4 relies on imagination. We don't even see the bombing raid. Instead we get parties, kids wandering around the base (last episode it was landgirls, farmers and livestock. Really? That happened?)
For a show about the war, where is the war? We see a badly shot up B-17 but again, we don't know if that is bad, normal or unlucky?
The shot down bomber crews in France making their way is interesting but perhaps this needs its own dedicated episode? Throwing it in just again renders it 'another day at the office.'
People have already made the point about the toff RAF crews being beaten up by the Americans and the Scots hating the English. Why does this trump having your audience able to remember the characters names?
Seriously, we had Crosby and his air sickness in episode 3. He's the best navigator ever we're told. And in episode 4 he vanishes. .
I do not object to explicitly deriding the RAF and nighttime area bombing. But the mistakes of daytime precision strategic bombing are left for us to infer. Given that I'm struggling to remember anyone's names, they shouldn't be counting on audiences inferring anything.
The whole show feels disconnected. We do not know the characters. They are distant and cold. The scene of a mother screaming outside the one bombed out house in an otherwise untouched street in a nice part of London. Why is that scene there? BoB had the care Winters felt for his men and his professionalism never allowing him to publicly confront Sobel. We cared about BoB characters because Spielberg used empathy. We saw Winters and liked to think we would behave the same. In MOTA we have a man dancing with his dog.
I'm concurrently watching the Das Boot series. Somehow this engages me far more and I'm aware of the scale of the war.
Also, the worrying undercurrent signalling virtue; buying the Daily Herald newspaper. I can no longer give this the benefit of the doubt and assume it was random. Other politically driven 'sensitivities' can be discerned. Attention to these clearly diverted energy from making the program better. Like others I was full of optimism for this show. FINALLY, something to take up where Memphis Belle left off. We don't get it.
World on Fire (2019)
The sunny delight generation does WW2
WW2 ultimately kills approximately 5% of the world's population. In one sentence, it is; German and Japanese men in uniform, killing Eastern Europeans, Soviet and Chinese civilians.
World on Fire is WW2 quite obviously overwhelming the serotonin-depleted temporary, part-time, substitute, drama teacher into whose incompetent fingers this story was given.
1. Two polish soldiers repeatedly cross Wehrmacht lines for 8 months and end up covering at least 1420km.
They go East and saw Soviet soldiers.
Then west.
THROUGH NAZI GERMANY.
Crossing German lines, (AGAIN), during the German offensive into Belgium, just in time to link up with British soldiers in May 1940. Eight months later.
World on Fire lacks the frontal lobes and opposable thumbs to understand any of this. Time. Geography. What happened.
2. Copy/paste CGI. All fighter planes of 611 Squadron (Digby Lincolnshire) have the same serial numbers.
All British newspapers are named 'CITY NAME plus Chronicle.'
This is just shoddy and inattentive.
Others have commented but it's worth saying again; phonecalls from Warsaw to Manchester as clear as a modern mobile phone and as quick?
Unrelenting cack-handed, flat-footed, shoe-horning of 2020 mores because the generation who actually fought fascism is 'problematic' for World on fire.
Are they media workers incapable of understanding the past? They can only judge it through an inadequate university education which patently short changed them.
This disregard for our past will advance the malign fairy-tales about WW2 produced under Putin and the Chinese Communist Party. If the products of free societies can willfully disregard truth, so can they.
World on Fire treats shabbily British generations who actually fought WW2.
For our tomorrow they gave their today. And this is how we repay that debt.
We call our shameless incompetence virtue.
Where are the adults who should be supervising this?
They long ago left.
My very deep apologies to the generations to whom we owe a very great debt. You deserved better from us.
Patriot (2015)
S1E1 keep watching. This is wonderful
Sure, the bitter and the cynical (which I am) would identify this as Wes Anderson derivative.......... but it's also wonderful TV. The stories operate at the personal level and only work because of the incredibly strong cast. Such great talent and so well deployed. This is writing. Steve Conrad and Bruce Terris bring the same Perpetual Grace LTD magic.
I can sort of understand why some gave it low scores because it does need a leap of faith for the first 20 minutes. But after 20 mins or so into S1E1 it starts to shine. IMAO......
The music, as also was seen in Perpetual Grace LTD, is again an essential part.
I don't know how else to express it but viewing this work transforms the viewer. I feel privileged to witness something which truly ennobles the viewer. There is still good in the world. Thank you.
Treason (2022)
A bit silly
Lessons in 'the craft' of spying;
1. If you're the second ranking officer of MI6 you should visit your nine year old son's school and tells his entire class (and teacher) that you not only work for MI6 but that you're the second-in-command.
And field any questions said classmates might have. Clearly this doesn't compromise you because that was your old job and your now head of MI6.
2. If you move a team to another country make sure they are all of the same age, body type, are clean cut and are smart. You should have them all fly business class on the same flight and they should have no luggage. This will arouse no suspicions.
3. Continue to use your iphone 9 to talk to people but this won't be a problem if you say 'is it safe?' before starting your conversation.
4. As an aside, make it very clear why Western intervention in Afghanistan failed by clarifying that all the characters served there.
5. Express concern when your ex-soldier patient in a military hospital knows that you served in the military.
Later, with zero irony, 'out' the location of a dead drop to a 'friend' who is a spy for another country who has suddenly reappeared in your life.
6. If you are the head of MI6 you can clock off from work when you are at the cinema.
7. Wives of MI6 bosses will immediately assume their husband is having an affair when he refuses to discuss his work.
8. Said wives will also resent work being brought home.
9. Said wife will, at the first opportunity, out a dead drop/undercover operation to that mate she hasn't seen for ages, who has also revealed she is a spy, in a coffee shop. Who gives her a pen to record her husband.
10. The only terrorists about which to be concerned in 2022 are Far Right groups.
11. Heads of relevant sections need not be notified if INTEL was received outside office hours.
12. MI6 bodyguards are easily outwitted by 14 year old schoolgirls.
13. Once your daughter is missing, phone your wife and scare the bejesus out of her before you know anything.
14. Have MI6 field agents of such ineptness that they cannot find someone who was 'hiding' on a barge and whose only means of egress was a canal. Literally there were two exits.
15. When your boss of MI6 husband receives a call from a woman and she has an East European accent immediately assume he is having an affair.
16. Those seeking the premiership of Great Britain will make speeches on the foreign aid budget to nine people in a food bank.
17. All citizens of former Warsaw pact countries are church goers.
18. Ok, the bit about the dodgy Russian funding a British politician wanting to be PM does worrryingly ring true.
Seriously what the hell has gone wrong with writers? I'm watching Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Again......