Metacritic-Rezensionen

Notre-Dame on Fire is really good at conveying an iconic building’s place in a nation’s soul, and the grief that its potential loss can provoke. Most of its symbolism is well-earned and resonant.

Engaging to watch and edifying about just how close Paris came to having rubble at its heart instead of the iconic gothic structure Victor Hugo’s hunchback called home, this thoughtful and meticulous re-creation of 24 incredibly dicey hours is mostly thrilling, despite the occasional groan-worthy line of dialogue or borderline dopey secondary character.

What the film does best is capture the daunting rage of the fire: Annaud combines muscular action sequences with actual footage of the event to eyebrow-scorching effect.

Veteran French director Jean-Jacques Annaud serves up some high-octane film-making with this old-fashioned disaster movie, composed in a docu-realist style, about the catastrophic fire that engulfed Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral in 2019.

The urgency of the project ironically detracts from the drama. The story is simply too recent and too fresh to yield any surprises on the big screen. The characters appear mostly fleetingly and without time and space for development. This is precisely why the genre demands recognisable faces with baggage.