Valerian and the Title of a Thousand Words

Another film slammed by the critics, Valerian suffered from four things many critics hate:

1) It has a long title

2) The source material is French

3) The director is French

4) One of the stars is a successful model

So cue the complaints that it would have been great if only the story was better and the lead actress could act...

Are you kidding? Cara Delevingne is at least as good as Dane DeHaan in this movie... and considerably better than Clive Owen who, bless him, chooses cold from his repertoire of "hot or cold". And she's nicer to look at.

OK. It's not perfect. But it is bloody good fun. There is so much going on... I think the bad-mouthers probably missed a lot of the good things because they were too busy looking at Cara Delevingne to notice... then were embarrassed to admit it at the end.

Sometimes with these "critics hated it, fans quite liked it" films I feel the need to defend the people who made it. This time I don't think I need to, because it is so obviously good. Just like The Fifth Element which also split the critics on release, I think it will become more appreciated over time.

Cool film.

Travelers - season 2

At the end of the first season of Travelers no-one knew what was going to happen next because the mission to change the future had been successful.

So we start season 2 with the team in the dark. Historian Philip starts to notice small differences from the future he learned. They still seem to be getting missions still. Their private lives need a lot of fixing...

The first few episodes feel quite slow; but I think they have to be to reflect the doubts the team have over their ongoing purpose. And then we get the bombshell about The Faction. Cool... bad guys (maybe, maybe not) who didn't even exist in the future when the team left it.

I really liked the way the whole Faction vs Director thing played out with our team stuck in the middle. The skydiving episode came at just the right time to emphasise the problem (which may have been stated before, but I missed it) that  The Director can't just send a traveler back further in time to fix something that didn't go right.

That is a nice take on the time travel set-up. Knowing that the present we have seen is now somehow fixed gives me comfort that we wont suffer a Bobby Ewing moment where a whole season or two gets trashed by a future past event.

For a long time I wondered why it mattered that Traveler #1 was still alive. I'm still not sure if he will turn out to just be a nuisance or to be the founder of The Faction. My image of him was heavily coloured by that fact that the same actor (Enrico Colantoni) played Elias, one of my favourite characters in Person Of Interest.

The ending of season 2 really is terrific. Everyone is involved, the sequence of events is not quite clear, and we are left with just enough information to feel satisfied... but still have lots of questions.

Don't make me wait toooooo long for season 3, please.

American Gods - season 1

I have been putting off writing anything about American Gods for a week now. It's proving hard to express what I thought about it. I have read the book, but it was several years ago ... more than ten years, in fact.

I remember reading the book. I remember liking the book, a lot. But when I started watching the TV series I couldn't recall anything about the plot and only that there were gods living in America as mostly normal people.

Did I expect the TV show to bring back memories? I think I probably did. But it didn't. I still can't remember what happens... I had to look up online to see if this season covers the whole of the book.

It doesn't. It covers about the first 1/3 of the book.

So does that mean they are planning 3 seasons?

This is probably my issue with the show. It seemed a bit slow. A bit like they are trying to spin out a 1-season book into 3 seasons... in the same way that Peter Jackson spun out The Hobbit (a short book) into 3 long movies.

The narrative is also all over the place, with frequent asides, sometimes whole episodes, to explain the backstory... or even just the main story. It just got annoying.

I liked the characters. But the storytelling is just wearing. I think I might ignore any further series and just read the book again instead.

Legion - season 1 - part 2

At the half way point I was quite non-committal about Legion. I really wasn't sure if I liked it or not, because it was (intentionally) confusing.

So now that I have seen the whole of Season 1 (all 8 episodes) what do I think? Hmmm. I think. On balance. That I didn't like it that much.

Clearly it conveys David's confusion and the complexity of reality on multiple planes very well. But it is relentless and that becomes wearing.

It also has a very clear 60s styling, but that didn't feel at all authentic to me. I got the impression that it was more of a parody... "oh look at these funny outfits on people who don't know what the hell is going on".

When we do get some snippets of information, it is either speculative (between Emotional American David and Rational English David) or suddenly spouted as fact by the mad-scientist-with-asian-female-inside guy who flip-flops repeatedly between completely useless and able to manufacture a device to fix everything in less than 10 minutes.

By the end, all we seemed to have seen was "the parasite" moving from David to Oliver Not-Dead-Just-Frozen. That was all that happened, right?

Reading online it is clear that David is the son of someone I have heard of. So are we keeping that secret for a big reveal in a later season? Why is this even called Legion? No-one calls him that. He doesn't call himself that. I think this might be the first TV show where no words from the title are uttered even once in any of the episodes.

Don't get me wrong. There were plenty of things I did like here. I would not have watched all 8 episodes if I thought it was all rubbish. When the agents were trying to pretend David was mentally ill and had no powers... that was brilliant. But I'm not in any hurry to watch a second season... this feels like a show that will always tease and confuse rather than delivering any actual stories.

Dark - season 1

Initially I was disappointed that Dark on Netflix was badly dubbed from the original German into English. But then I discovered that you can easily change the settings to have German dialogue and English subtitles. My German isn't great, but dubbing sucks the emotion out of most scenes, so I always prefer the original soundtrack with subtitles.

This is just the sort of drama I like. It is complicated. You have to try and work out what is going on, just as the characters are trying to make sense of the situation.

Throw in some time-travel and you also have to work out who is the older or younger version of who... who went missing / time-travelled... and whether anyone has actually changed anything or just made what was going to have happened happen. Right?

And it really is dark. Most of the characters are nasty or selfish or both. Normally that would make me complain that there are few people to care about, but here the complexity seems able to replace that need. I was too busy keeping on top of "who's who?" to really worry about anyone's well-being.

For example "poor old" Ulrich almost comically gets more and more beaten up as the episodes pass... but he deserves it, judging by what he does. Or does he? Because we also see hints in his past of terrible abuse.

There is a constant sense of delayed consideration here. You watch something, try and make sense of the immediate questions (who is who) and then only get to consider the why in the quieter moments, or between episodes.

I'm still not sure I totally followed what happened. There was at least one character that I failed to match to his younger self until quite near the end... probably not helped by mishearing his name early on before I discovered how to turn on the subtitles.

Great stuff. Hopefully there will be a second season.