Hernán

The series try to tell us one of the most dramatic and interesting stories that happened ever in the course of the human history of this planet. The story of the conquest of the New World; of Cortez and Moktesuma! It's useless to say I like the idea behind the movie, not so much the performance, alas. Even older, Apocalypto is stil better, such kind of movie cries for the best possible financing in order for the final result to be satisfying. The task is not easy - recreating a world so totally different from ours, with 99 % of its architecture destroyed, with massive battles involving thousands of participants. And I would like to see them in movie with this plot, not Gandhi! Anyway, the movie is far from bad, worth seeing. And we can thank its creators for the effort!

The show is entertaining and the actors do a good job. However, it is very unrealistic. Native Mexicas are depicted as good-hearted people (like Rousseau's Noble Savage) who accidentally sacrifice and oppress other humans without bad intentions. If you ignore this absurd premise, it is a good show.

One star for the Mexicans and three others for the fact they speak Spanish, Maya and Nahuatl. Sadly, that's as generous I can be. Who in heaven's sake starts a conquest this epic in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan?! If there's one thing you can build up to! As entering the capital should be more like the season's final. It soon became clear why they thought they could begin the story in the capital: Flashbacks. Someone seemed to think it would be a very clever idea to use lots of flashbacks. However, these flashbacks bring nothing to the table but are just a way to masquerade the fact that they have no clue how to tell a story. If they can't use flashbacks properly they should just shoot the story in chronological order. About 9 minutes in they commit the capital error nr 1 in filmmaking: "Don't say it, show it". When one of the conquistadors starts whining about some vision he had blablabla. Again it didn't bring anything to the table, it was rather annoying and as I can't stress enough it broke a capital rule in filmmaking. But I guess same with the flashbacks someone thought it would be a great idea to have a character in the story who has a vision of some sort. Nope. It's the main problem with this series: the script. More specifically the poor quality of it. There's just nothing - not one line of dialogue or storyline - that is salvageable if you would start afresh, say if for example you had more budget and you had a second chance to redeem yourself. Actually, they showed so much in just the first episode that they practically told all the different aspects of the real story, the conquest that is. They showed so much I wonder (as I only saw the first episode) what the hell are they going to talk about in the rest of the season? Oooh yeah, I forgot: flashbacks!! I really wanted this to be good but if they knew beforehand that they only have the talent to shoot a telenovela than they should've left the story alone.

Starting with bad points:

• They decided to use permanent flashback, there is no beginning, no middle and no end to the story, it is all messed up, unbearable. It is a very poor choice, specially because the history of the conquest was to slowly discover that there was a quasi mythical city in a middle of a continent.
• It is an amazon production, so they bend history a bit in order to fit their liberal stereotypes (Europeans bad, Christians bad, Muslims good etc ...) but not too much (and these strong women lovers forgot about Maria de Estrada).
• The production want us to believe that Spaniards massacred thousands of cholulan just for fun ...because "Europeans bad" I guess. The fact is that Cholula was a trap, the Spaniards were about to get massacred so they (over)reacted the way they did. Later on, Alvarado massacre was much more disputable however motivated by his hatred for local tradition (kid sacrifices etc ...).
• Obviously Cortes never had a muslin girlfriend, and if muslins weren't very popular in Spain, it was because Spaniards just liberated themselves from muslins after 8 centuries of domination (I wish liberal production mentioned that more often but .... "Muslims good" I guess).

Good points:

• Except few exceptions mentioned above, they really try to stick to the history even with tiny details. We got more of the point of view of the Conquistadors but there are a lot of fantastic descriptions of the very diverse pre-Columbian societies.

So it is fantastic to have a fairly accurate visual depiction of what were the fascinating pre-Columbian civilizations and this incredible moment of history. But in order to understand I recommend to study the history of the conquest before watching the show because of the permanent flash back/forward. I would have gave a 10 stars if the history was in order.

A beautiful series totally vtuined by the frequent change in timeline. It just doesn't let you connect and stay with the storyline. Whoever decided to use this timeline jump is responsible for killing the story.