David Edward Walker

I guess most viewers didn’t like this movie. It was laden with symbol and metaphor, and maybe most people find that stuff boring or obscure or slow. I found it riveting, funny, dark, satirical, and thought-provoking. It was a kind of visual poem about the times we live in and our new versions of human fear and suffering mixed together with very old dilemmas. Scenes with animals approaching humans visually express how we’re utterly failing as stewards of this planet and its creatures. They come in physically close to the main characters as though to ask, “what the hell are you going to do to turn this around?” So many bizarre and darkly funny events occur related to how fundamentally lost we’d be without our smartphones and technology to distract us and how vulnerable and duped we are by our dependence on tech. Is it Koreans? Russians? Iranians? The Evil Cabal? Or simply Us and how we live right now? The ultimate question too - will we band together in the face of clear and present danger around us all right now, talk through and overcome our differences, either out of simple compassion or for our own survival, or just point our guns and gradually kill one another off? Isolate, destroy communication, and watch what happens. It’s that easy. And that’s in metaphors all through. Even certain visual subtleties ask, how long do we bury our heads in the sand? Check it out, multiple scenes of sand threatening or succeeding in engulfing and burying people. Pretty unsubtle. Then the finale interprets today’s rampant escapism into burying one’s own head inside a 90s sitcom rerun in an elegant bunker. Definitely not mere entertainment, if that’s what you were wanting. This movie sets up enemies and heroes within the interior of each character as they seek to transcend their own fear, distrust, and hopelessness. It’s a satire asking whether we should continue just entertaining ourselves like solitary children or consider instead what the hell we might do together to try to save our world. Sorry if you didn’t like it or get it. Please consider watching again, wonder why when you’re occasionally laughing somewhat uncomfortably, and then contemplate what this film might be suggesting to you. That’s my hope for those folks who didn’t like it.

This series is an intensely rich and moving visual metaphor for a country that has never truly acknowledged its own realities or healed from them, but through the viewership of this kind of fringe creativity, is finally beginning to awaken to its “past-in-the-present.” There will be those who won’t understand the symbols or won’t want to feel what the poetry of this great work tells them about themselves. If you’re heart is open, however, and you watch the whole series, and can tolerate the necessity of depicting the suffering that brought this country to where it is now, you’ll rediscover in this story told your own possibilities for love, forgiveness and transcendence. The English is that good. Then again, if all that means nothing to you, pay attention to the reviews by people who’d rather be “entertained,” stay asleep with their eyes open, and watch meaningless drivel.

Saccharine lead heroine with no known background or motives. Token gay couple covertly surviving fascist Italy dropped in for effect. Josephine Baker lookalike tries but fails to enliven a dead script. Very despicable villains draw circles around confused and timid heroes you’d like to throttle for their lack of balls. The sunsets on the Mediterranean were gorgeous. The townspeople were extras from an infomercial. The hotel logo was clever and looked good on the towels. We can’t believe we watched the whole thing. We had to know if this Masterpiece production was really as bad as it appeared. Now we can never get that time back. A travesty.