Herschell Bennett

Warning: this film is a warning. Having read some of the critical bile irresponsibly lathered across it, I wanted to watch it. The universal contempt for the story stood above any other darts being thrown at it. But the film is hated for its message which is that Capitalism makes fools of us all. Our collective addictions to social media and shallow pastimes is on full display. At times counterintuitive and often brutal in its depictions of white supremacy, it was made to disturb the complacency that our times has induced. Perhaps the most telling byproduct is that the Obama’s were part of the production. Are they trying to tell us something? You’ve been warned.

This is a mystic mashup of animation pokery, coupled with an amazing confidence and sense of meaning. Initially I was prepared to be boarded by the usual rogue individuals, on a mission, form an unbreakable bond. Nah, dispensing messily with gender and sexual tropes, this is Formula One with Donald Trump hoping to kill Lewis Hamilton and blaming Black Matters for another appalling crime against humanity. Midway through there is a psycotic break (no, I won’t let it go off) & it was so jarring that I broke one of my tv bulls and rewound it, twice to see how this wonderful production insouciantly smooshed its way on screen. Advertisers: false flag operators of the lowest rank, bombard us with binge worthy programs and hope for the Pavlovian drool. But this one, this one will have you reaching for the tissues to wipe your slobbering mouth. Worth every second.

Patrick Stewart needs to be stopped. His narcissism has destroyed something great. He’s a small man whose being allowed to impress his limited worldview in all of us and his intellectual and artistic sensibilities belong to a dark age. I will not watch this anymore.

Synder has finally killed the Zombie film. I did not feel any sense of involvement with the characters and story. It’s scatterbrained and insecure. I really made an effort for the actors sake but the director killed them slowly. He should not have this job anymore.

Although the lead actors are great technicians and are able to craft performances of some interest there’s a soulless, predictable drift to this film that makes it vaguely irritating. If I had to square up to the director of this is what I would place before him: your film left me as cold as the characters. Pike is a dangerous presence and Dinklage is compelling but even they can’t save such an indulgent film. I listened to Marla opine her Hobbesian world view and thought, I have just lived through 4 years of Donald Trump, this is small potatoes. As a morality tale it is flimsy and again, vaguely risible. That word, vague keeps on turning up. I am so vague about it that I may watch it again (in five years time) becaue I would have forgotten the plot and the point of it.

Julian Fellowes wrote this and I’m concerned he may not share the same quantum signature that the rest of us do in this universe. I am saying for the record, he maybe a refugee from another universe or timeline, who may have harmful intentions. His visions of the past are so childlike and impossible that I can’t but think he has seen this somewhere and knows it to be true. That said, please do not watch this for the sake of all the spermatozoa and eggs in our world because this cannot be suffered by unborn generations. That’s real child abuse.

A well conceived (for the neophyte like myself) and brilliant graphic description of a beloved game. It hit all the right buttons: gracious in it's depiction of the period, with marvellous inflections brought about by the judicious use of costume, setting and music. The revelatory use of the suspended chess board, in mid-air, captures something of the way a mind like this must operate, at a certain level, to achieve these great feats of cognition. The lead actor was even better than the script in many ways. She not only captured the nature of trauma in childhood but communicated something more universal: the way in which all of us are confused by flow of life, which at times, is overwhelming and can lead to self-defeat. The relationship between mother and daughter was moving; shifting from general distrust to a mutable deep trust and love. I believed in this core performance, so that when her step-mother died, I was moved, not because I was suppose to but because it was so low key, so bathetic, that you could only feel the deep loss that this character must have felt. Her absence was felt beyond her presence. There were no cheap shots: the ambiguity about her biological mother's mental health, the circumstances of her death, was left up to us to understand. We were never patronised. As magical as the whole narrative was, it never felt false. And I loved her black sister. She made sense. The parts were made whole and that's how it left me feeling. Great TV.

Brave, playful and relentless. This is television at its highest. Yes, the group of motley hunters are idealised types that can appear obvious but very quickly you recognise the target of this biting satire on real power. With it’s always circling back to the insidious interior world of modern day Nazi’s and their hangers-on in Washington and the western elite, you are left in no doubt who to hate and why. Unlike so many pompous shows that purport to be profound, this manages with its slick editing, accurate dressing of the period, jesting soundtrack, to leave you morally challenged, almost compromised in the watching of it. The segments which address the fourth wall will find you laughing and cursing at the same time. It’s not mocking you, it’s asking you to take a position. It’s a deeply ethical production. We are used to twists and false starts in much that passes for art but you cannot fathom the turn this series takes, I defy you to say that you saw it coming. I can only hope that the eight million murdered victims of Nazis and their surviving families will find this a restful epitaph for their legendary suffering. I fervently wish for a second series as Watchmen is unlikely to make a second outing and there’s little in the Make America Great Again world to look forward to outside of this.

Is it possible to go backwards from 1966 and make us understand why Gene Roddenberry was so desperate to challenge the presiding ideas of his time? Well this manages to do so, without wit or intelligence. The United Federation of Planets is nothing more than a gauzy mock up of an imperialist United States, with the prancing Captain Kirk, not as I ever imagined him or even saw him, alternately stamping, shouting and screaming his way across the Milky Way. His behaviour is reflected in the cast, who are almost singularly white. This monochrome world is not adjusted by aliens, who are badly made up and costumed white Americans, playing at their childhood heroes. It’s just sad to watch. And as much I despair with Discovery and Picard, this is retro I. The worst sense of that word and needs to be abolished along with slavery.

I made a mistake. I should have jumped on this dramatic typhoon much earlier. The writing, the acting, direction and most importantly, design have only been matched, in my mind by HBO’s ‘Rome’. And it shares much with that amazing production: historically awkward and contentious, twisted and compressed to serve tv scheduling and at times, pandering to notions of the Mongols which are plain wrong. But for all that, truly great and enlightening. It’s been six years since this masterpiece was squashed and it hasn’t been bettered by any other historical drama to date. Netflix needs to revise its algorithmic metrics and start thinking about its legacy because very soon, that’s all we‘ll have to remember it by.