Hector Crean

It's been a long while since I've read the book, and so I remember it only vaguely. The TV series is, I believe, in its own right compelling and well crafted. That is not to say I was engaged initially –– it took some time for me to have any great care for the characters involved. Very slowly, however, we see actors subtly illustrate the exquisite tenderness & rawness of human emotion. Do not let the frequency nudity/sex etc. distract, or detract, from the fact that this series deals very deftly, and with no small skill, with feelings of loss, longing, wanting to belong. That is what dystopian novels/tv adaptions are for, are they not? Illustrating the dark attraction of alternate ways of being -- following through to the logical conclusion of the fate of societies when human nature and a particular political philosophy of governance are intermingled. There are obviously great flaws, but it passed the only test that really matters, to me –– it made me feel something

The middle 30 minutes of this film - charting the meeting of Alicia Vikander and James McAvoy at a hotel in Northern France -- is coy, sublime, tender and incredibly real. It is of a completely different level to the rest of the film, which never really escalates beyond a fairly one-dimensional narrative arc. It is perhaps worth watching for those 30 minutes alone. It is a shame that this highly charged vignette was not able to be incorporated into a more sophisticated larger storyline, as the pastoral, fin de siecle Summer scenes in Atonement were framed by Dunkirk etc. It's a shame that Submergence, for all its potential, was never able to kick on into the bracket of a good, or indeed great, film.