Rebecca Wainwright

Plenty of plus points: great characters, nifty CGI, interesting sciency hypotheticals. I’m always irritated by gratuitous swearing in a script: just like in real life it’s a lazy way of communicating what you have to say. The plot could have been just as compellingly told with the quality of acting available without every character having to say “what the f***” every single time anything happened. I was also irritated that immensely inventive ideas like the countdown, flashing stars and the video game just seemed to get abandoned as the plot started to get flaccid in episode 5. Episode 8 came to a halt at no particular point in the plot leaving me wondering if there’s a second series (and if so can I be bothered) or if leaving everything unresolved was meant to be some kind of Statement about humanity.

Beautiful direction and a decent treatment of a complex character in Alice, except that her past trauma didn’t get explored and we didn’t get an explanation of how she got over it. The story follows an enduring love. However, we don’t see enough at the outset of *why* they fell in love. There were no happy scenes until the last episode, shown in flashback. So I felt the power of the in-love-ness wasn’t justified. Overall it was pretty gloomy, and unnecessarily sweary. But it was also compelling, and gave us plenty to talk about.

This might have been an interesting storyline if anyone with a faint clue how to write a script had got their hands on it. There are many baffling things about this movie, but it is staggering just how often everybody takes off their PPE to head into danger. It says it’s dedicated to the heroes of Chernobyl, but really it makes them all look like inept twits who could barely string a sentence together.

This book offers a moderately scientific insight into how we develop habits as individuals and within organisations. The section on Starbucks is interesting, as is the chapter on gambling. It’s tolerably thought-provoking. The author writes authoritatively about his ‘facts’ and then includes a long list of alternative facts in an appendix. This seriously concerned me. Reading these reveals that he has shaped, twisted, re-imagined and occasionally directly made up his ‘facts’. This allows him to weave a strong and readable compelling narrative, but ultimately destroyed my confidence in him as an author.