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Halo (series 2)
[3 stars]
I so want to like this show more than I do, but it hasn’t improved much over the first series. It is still packed with world-building and great fights and effects. However, the characters remain more puppets than people in many cases. And the story… well, let me back up.
I never played Halo. FPS is not my genre and while I tried I just wasn’t able to have fun dying every 3 seconds in the game and eventually walked away. So I have no grounding in the root story. That shouldn’t matter for the series. I can’t speak to how closely it is sticking to the game or books plot, but I know how rich that was and I suspect they’re too scared to stray from it given the size of the audience. My biggest clue is that at the end of this season there is a left turn that, well left me behind. I can make guesses as to what it all meant, but I was simply annoyed and confused. I’m sure the leap came directly from the game, but if you haven’t played the game you have only a glimmer of a thought as to what happened.
I’m sure they will explain more in the next season. I’m also sure there will be one unless the sale of Paramount goes through and that scuttles the plan. But from a viewer point of view, it was a radical shift that didn’t intrigue as much as annoy me. Not because it wasn’t explained, but because the characters in the show seemed to understand a good deal of the situation and I still didn’t understand.
On a more practical level, the addition of Cristina Rodlo was a nice expansion of the cast. Pablo Schreiber (First Man) continues to evolve in compelling ways, navigating his self-discovery and waking up to the twisted politics that rule his life. Similarly Kate Kennedy (Midsummer Night’s Dream) expands her character in interesting ways. But other characters, new like Joseph Morgan (Brave New World), and old from the prior season, became even less believable… portrayed as one-dimensional politicos with little nuance.
But if what you want are battles more than science and discussion, this season is probably for you. Plenty of carnage. Plenty of running and betrayal and triumph and failure. Aspects of all that play well, if a little cliche. But whatever’s coming seems to be a big shift, given the finale. And you can bet I’m interested in finding out what comes next and how this wraps up or continues. That is a credit more to Schreiber and the cast than it is to the writers, but that’s OK. Interesting characters create interesting plot, even when it is stock.
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New Post has been published on Harold Gross: The 5a.m. Critic
New Post has been published on https://literaryends.com/hgblog/3-body-problem/
3 Body Problem
[3.5 stars]
TL;DR: An interesting interpretation that isn’t all I’d hoped but which picked up aspects the previous adaptation didn’t. But I am hooked and want to see where they take it all now that they’ve set up what really interested them in the story. So, yes, you should see it. It isn’t an instant classic, but they’ve, ultimately, built some good bones.
Now the long version:
Dune, infamously, had all manner of attempts to adapt it over the years. From the unproduced Jodorowsky, to the Lynch attempt of the 80s, to the dual 200X SyFy Channel entries to, finally, the Villeneuve masterpiece. Like Dune, I think we’re in another decades-long saga of waiting for the person who can do this story right.
I have to admit, I am having a hell of a time getting the book and the Tencent adaptation of the same out of my head enough to give this a clean review. But suffice to say, neither adaptation really nails the full story. And both have aspects they do better than the other. If we could merge the them, we’d get a better overall experience.
The Chinese series excelled at taking its time, really sinking into the pace and structure of the books. Liu created a wonderful slow boil in the books that only slowly revealed itself to the reader. This new version rushes to provide answers, speeding past the suspense and shifts rather than mirroring the whole point. And this is where the latest adaptation reveals itself.
What interested the writers in the newer version is what comes up in the last three episode. Conversely, this is where the Chinese series peters out story-wise (despite one extraordinary moment that both series share). The Netflix version, however, is just getting its legs by the end. Weiss and Benioff (Game of Thrones), along with Alexander Woo, were most intrigued by what comes over the long haul of the story. And it is a great story (Liu got two more brick-sized novels out of it). But the series really compacted too much into the 8 episodes. We never got to enjoy the sense of mystery and the peeling back of the layers. 10 or 12 episodes would have been more appropriate.
But I was thrilled that they provided better motivations for the main instigator of the plot and were less jaundiced in their depiction of history. They also tackled the more complicated aspects of the response to the events of the tale around the world. The Tencent version sort of glossed and then dropped that thread, capturing the despair, but not the long vision of how to deal with it.
But this series also took some liberties with the plot to get it into present day as well as gender-flipped and splintered some characters to create a larger ensemble. Frankly, those changes mostly worked for me, though it was a bit confusing at first knowing the original material. Fortunately, it’s mostly a great cast. Rosalind Chao (Together Together), Benedict Wong (Raya and the Last Dragon), Jovan Adepo (Babylon), Alex Sharp (Living), Liam Cunningham (The Vault), John Bradley (Moonfall), and Jess Hong are all solid in their roles.
In fact, only Eiza González (Ambulance) didn’t work for me. And boy she didn’t work. Her character, one of the gender flips and splinters, didn’t seem at all to have the intelligence and presence she needed to be at the crux of world-changing events. Emotions, yes, but there was no understanding behind her eyes when she spoke about anything other than that. A cardinal sin in good science fiction.
All of that said, I hope they get to continue the tale. I can’t really give it the clean watch I’d have loved to provide, so I also am not able to properly assess it at the moment. But I am intrigued by where they’re going now that they’ve set up the foundation of what they really wanted to do. I do think they made some major mistakes building the season that way, but perhaps it works better for those that don’t know anything going in? I dearly wish I could combine the two series to get something that better captures the feel of the book and the scope of the story. However, like Dune I suspect we’ll have to wait for another attempt down the road. For now, this is far from bad…just not perhaps everything I’d have hoped. And the subsequent seasons may still succeed in ways I haven’t anticipated.
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I always underestimate how easy it can be to entertain a teenager. I have this preconception that small kids find everything fun even mundane stuff while teens are jaded and self-conscious and need elaborate or cool activities, but my teen cousins are visiting this week and when they arrived I was in the greenhouse having an issue with the filter in one of the tanks, so I asked them if they could catch all the fish from one tank and move them to the other tank, and they were delighted to be given little dip nets and sit on the edge of the tank to hunt fish for 20min. As I asked them to do it I was thinking, it’s like those duck-fishing fairground games from when they were toddlers, they’ll probably think it’s a bit cringe, and five minutes into it these jaded teenagers were like, hey it’s like duck fishing at the funfair when we were toddlers, I've missed it, it’s fun :D
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