Nathan Kwiatkowski

I was already skeptical about naming a sequel movie "A Knives Out Mystery" simply because Knives Out was amazing. It felt like trying too hard, which was exactly what this movie was. The characters were the opposite of subtle, when subtlety is what the original movie thrived on. Everyone acted completely illogically, the character's motivations and relationships didn't make sense. Even Benoit Blanc fell prey to the poor writing epidemic once or twice, although he was the best part of the show. Overacting reigned supreme and I guess the producer thought if there were enough off-color jokes, attractive people, and beautiful CGI, we might not notice that the movie doesn't begin to attain to the title "Mystery".

I was excited about this show, but after watching the first couple episodes, I couldn't get over a few issues. The script seemed nonsensical. The things people said didn't really make sense or were purely audience-facing dialogue. It sounded like they wanted to write something that sounded old and profound but they just didn't know how. Small details seemed off like the number of people in Galadriel's expedition was too small. Galadriel's team of elite warriors seemed terribly ill-equipped to deal with a troll - how did they expect to defeat Sauron? The celebration that Sauron was gone had an audience of like 20 or 30 people in the Elven capital, and the celebration itself contained nothing of substance. Celebrimbor and Elrond leaving for Kazad-dum and then arriving the next scene, walking out from behind a mountain with no sense of how long it took or how they got there, and then Celebrimbor just walking back nonchalantly? The entrance to the undying lands seeming like a raging fire instead of a beautiful utopia. A random ship being close enough to the undying lands to pick up Galadriel. Galadriel thinking she could swim all the way back to middle-earth. Being unable to easily distinguish between men and elves seems off. The lack of older wiser characters who have advice worth hearing. Everyone in this show is super young. Contrast Galadriel and Elrond's emotional conversation to Gandalf and Elrond having a big-boy discussion about what to do with the ring. Older, wise characters add a sense of gravity to the show and a point of reference about what's truly important and what's not. On the flip-side, I did like the Harfoots for the most part. They blended older, mature characters with young fun characters. I might watch another episode to see if it improves.