Reviews

Fascinating, eye opening view by an independent American documentary crew filming the IRA during their most turbulent times.

The problem is the IRA rated themselves a bit too smart, the film crew were lead by the CIA, MI5 + MI6 and Mossad, who were smarter.

The footage and interviews gained are ground-breaking for the time, it's a shame that it took 50+ years for the BBC to get hold of this 'documentary'. Why the inverted commas? It seems that this was an infiltration and intelligence operation all along. Lots of unfiltered footage for the above mentioned services to study, and I'm sure they did.

No one comes out of this untarnished, not even Martin McGuinness, the main architect of the Good Friday Agreement.

Watch it twice, this is too informative to be ignored. I'm an Englishman, and yet again I'm ashamed.

I didn't really know what to expect but Ozzie stuff is normally pretty good and a bit left field. This didn't disappoint. I got the feel of the Coen brothers and Fargo. All of the characters were very Ozzie apart from the Yank, who was equal parts baffled and an alien (deliberate joke, you'll see).

It's a 'who done it' laced with a huge WTF?! I really enjoyed the unpeeling of this small town, the myriad of twists and unexpected happenings, it kept me guessing until the very end.

Not one bad actor, they embrace and flesh out their parts nicely.

Highly recommended for a Saturday night or Sunday afternoon binge, it'll fly by.

This is not real. Google the company name and come up with nothing apart from a folk music website. The main donor, 'Gillian' is obviously an actor and not a good one. But she's 'poor' and being paid for her flesh to be grown in a vat and eaten by more of the 'poor', so all is good? Soylent Green without the secrecy.

Gregg does his normal over the top super excited self that he'd also put into the origins of a table leg.

I kind of get what this programme intends to say 'if we want to keep eating meat this is an option'. Cannibalism is cost effective. Especially for the poor that are caught in the cost of living crisis.

The 'tenderest' meat comes from children in a shocking addition at the end of the show. A hard watch.

The press have gone mad over it, they obviously haven't seen it and have made an editorial/political decision just based on the idea. Although some seem to think it really is real. Daily Mail, how dumb do you feel now that you've seen it?

At first I gave this 4 stars, sick TV, but now after realising the message? A solid 7.

Is this our future?

We start with the director giving his cues to the effects dept and extras, a character starts to run through the rain... And the tone is set. Wonderfully original directing leads us to two superb actors (Olivia Coleman & David Thewlis) that 'just are' their characters, Susan & Christopher Edwards. A middle aged couple entirely in love with each other, yet very traditional, and hiding, their general drabness is certainly excellent camouflage.

Susan is depicted as part living in a fantasy world based on her love of cinema, especially old westerns. Christopher is the doting husband desperately seeking a job in a land where the language defeats him with his painfully bad job interviews.

There are so many different styles used, however they blend into each other seamlessly. Some of the lighting techniques/tricks are straight out of the theatre and early colour film. Yet they really do work in this mix of old/new. Dropping characters into strange locations to deliver monologues through the fourth wall was very effective. A lot of the credit has to go to the visual editor, Elen Pierce Lewis, who must have many a headache during the cutting.

Then we meet the detectives that receive a tip off. One smart, one stupid and one a sweary, aggressive, sexist bully that regularly loses it with fits of rage, and he's also the boss. I don't think we're meant to like him, I certainly don't. What would now be described as 'an old school copper'.

The end credits are also worth a watch, a real mixture of the real and the imaginary. You'll see an original photo of the Edwards, and then a shot of the crew striking (dismantling) a set, plus other stuff that's meant to be against 'the rules' of directing, but in this case just aren't.

The original soundtrack borrows heavily from past epics, Hitchcock would love some of the tension created by it.

Now, here's a caveat, I've only watched one episode so far. If the next three ep's are as good I'll revise this from a 9/10 to a 10/10. It's that good.

The master of his craft, exec producer and director is Will Sharpe. Watch out Chris Nolan, this dude is inevitably coming to Hollywood.

UPDATE - All 4 episodes watched. The directing gets even more quirky, the lines between fact and fiction more blurred until by ep' 3 we get to see all of the sets and the workings of film making 'full frontal'.

Are they guilty? There is no definitive answer, but I reckon so. Shame really. Susan is obviously a compulsive liar, Chris is obviously a bit of a mug. But Susan's parents were undoubtedly bad, even evil. Karma? Karma would be that they get out soon. They've been punished enough.

The only thing that bothered me was how the engineer got where he was and survived the launch, but apart from that this was very plausible from a science and engineering point of view.

The first thing I liked was the countdown and systems check audio while those annoying production and distribution company logos and animations blight the start of every film. No need to click ahead by a couple of minutes, bliss.

The Commander, Marina (Toni Collette) is obviously in charge and suffers the weight of a ton of seemingly insurmountable problems, yet like a true leader listens to her crew before making tough decisions. After breaking her arm she's asked why she's not screaming in pain 'it hurts' she says in a deadpan way. Ozzies are built tough. If the script were mine she would have said 'I'm an Ozzie'.

The Doctor, Zoe (Anna Kendrick) takes seriously the 'do no harm' part of her Hippocratic oath and truly cares; she's also the clown of the crew so a real morale booster. The Yale vs Harvard joke was pretty cool.

The Botanist, David (Daniel Day Kim) is the pragmatist and most serious of the bunch, logic and reason are his guiding light. This becomes a minus as events unfold, but he manages to redeem himself eventually. Luckily I'm not the Commander of this mission otherwise he would have been shoved out of the airlock in a second.

The Stowaway and Launch Engineer, Michael (Shamier Anderson) is the unwitting spanner in the works. He does not want to be there but there's no going back. He's a likeable character, and the crew do, a lot. Which makes things so much tougher.

At first I was baffled that there weren't more fail safes built into the spacecraft. As the story unfolds it transpires that weight was stripped back so that a 2 person craft could be made into a 3 person craft, at the expense of safety. Didn't they learn anything from Apollo 13?!

Overall a good watch, a solid 8, just don't expect any explosions or violence or any of that B Movie Sci Fi crap.