Folge #1.1

This is a brilliant book & I had high hopes for a film adaptation but Netflix have ruined it. The lead German actor is reasonable, if dull. Lars Eidinger is brilliant ( see Babylon Berlin) but the so-called French female lead isn't French and has no acting ability AT ALL. Hard to understand the casting. So at what point did they decide not to take the French language language and acting ability into consideration? There must be hundreds of good French actresses in London /US. Do Netflix take us all for idiots?

It so very sad to see such a brilliant book brought down by awful acting. Kept wondering if it was the script-but no.

I loved the book with its beautiful writing, fascinating main characters, and imaginative storyline. The scenes in this episode with the girl and her father are well-acted and are reminiscent of the book. The rest of this opening episode is well done but focuses on the dark and desperate situation in the French coastal town, Saint Malo. I would have liked more early on of the past (pre-war flashbacks) and less of the present (1944 post D-Day) to pull us into the characters and their histories more at the start. I'm reminded by the tone of this episode of the 1960s American TV show "Combat" where American GIs and Nazi soldiers would frequently find themselves spending an entire one-hour episode in a dangerous stalemate fighting over one farmhouse or town building. Anyway, it's off to a good start and I hope that it picks up the pace a bit in the next episodes and fully realizes the wonderful storytelling of the book.

This show is all over the place so far. Set design is fantastic and some of the acting is great. However, being adapted from a well loved book, which I haven't read, the dialogue is at some points so ridiculously forced that I can't really get immersed into the show. I get that introducing the characters in the first episode is important, but at some points it's almost literally "I'm (fill in the blank) and this is what I do." One of the key examples is the bakery scene. Marie walks in and sees her uncle for about 15 seconds where he proceeds to explain the whole point of what she's doing instead of letting the story naturally play out. Everything seems so forced and does far too much hand holding in assuming the audience won't be able to pick up on characters without flat out telling them what's going on. Almost every scene in the first half of the episode is some variation of the bakery scene in terms of character introductions. I think I may be being too harsh because other aspects of the show are great and I'll continue watching. But to me these aspects are pretty hard to ignore. However, l love the fact that they actually used visually impaired actors who did their job quite well. 6.5/10.

This series is adapted from the brilliant book of the same name by Anthony Doerr.

The casting is terrible and the acting/dialogue is equally as bad. Some of the dialogue is so obviously bad it's almost laughable. It looks like Netflix have done their usual thing of under developing an idea, throwing huge amounts of money at it and hoping it works. Unfortunately, yet again, it hasn't.

On the plus side, the sets are beautiful. 10* for the set designers I suppose.

Please, do yourself a favour and don't watch this, at least until you have read the book, which is an absolutely outstanding read..

Yeah, yeah, I get it: we need light to see but yet we don't always see it. I mean... you might have called it "unseen light" or something...

I bet they thought they were making a thoughtful and revitalizing rumination on evil, morality, truth, persisting against adversity blah blah blah.

I wonder if I use the word "sophomoric" too often but this had absolutely no self-awareness at all. The lay on the attempt at lyricism and pathos with a shovel and it is not subtle in the slightest. That moment when the title becomes dialogue can be amazing but they are as premature as a high-school boy in the delivery and that is a microcosm of this simpering little flag waver.

I might have really liked this when I was 14. The way it colloquizes in a poetical, stylized way with its characters trapped in that episode of history where everything went a bit cuckoo bananas (I think it was just one time; no others ever get into movies).

But it is relentless with pseudo-intellectual drivel and overtones of smugness. The flashbacks with the little blind girl are especially saccharine (quelle petite garce!) and the extended metaphor of the light is so heavy handed...

Everything you need to make sure your serious story isn't taken seriously is there. There's isn't a single character that is both likable and developed. Very sentimental and none of the candour that made Game of Thrones credible; it just talks down to you.

Finally, this cannot be said enough:

It's NOT OK that it's in English.

It's NOT OK that it's in English.

It's NOT OK that it's in English.

That cast a shadow over the whole thing and it wasn't great to begin with.

Unintriguing, flaccid and simply irksome to watch.

I wish that the light had never found this.