Nethlem

I went into this with rather low expectations, I'm more into anime than Batman, big fan of the Yakuza games.

But this still delivered in a "fun stupid" way that's right on the mark for why I love stuff out of Japan.

Usually I don't like cell-shaded animation, but some of the character designs in this have a charme, the animation is nothing to write home about, but does its job.

Just don't take this too seriously, it's not supposed to be, it's the kind of "Sharknado" like guilty pleasure type of movie.

Had so much fun with it that it even got me to watch the "prequel", and tbh that was just "stupid bad", while this one hits the magic middle ground of "stupid good".

Apparently this show is based on a pretty good book, which in parts shines trough only to get completely drowned out by the absolute horrendous script writing and massive plot holes.

The pacing feels too fast for its own good, while still never giving a real good scale of the scene or time-progression between events, constantly introducing new meaningless characters and sub-plots.

There's such an abundance of g-men, apparently all with their own sinister agendas, and own plots, at times I lost track of who is who.

A good example being Nigel Bennett, who shows up in the first episode as the first g-man, suspiciously releasing the first two infected people way preemptively. Initially it feels a bit smart, hinting the the viewer in, because even the lead scientist character reacts skeptical.

But that whole situations seems completely forgotten, Nigel Bennett doesn't show up again in the series after that.

The vast majority of characters are one-dimensional cliches. A hacker character is named "Jergen Weber", the name should imply him being German, I guess, and actually being named Jürgen, as Jergen is not a surname. But there's no German dialect with the guy, and he himself is happy to call himself "Jergen", poor guy. The whole show feels odd and way off in those kinds of ways, a complete lack of realism and coherence.

After a while the only reason I kept watching was to see where this all was going, how bad it could get, and I was not disappointing with expecting more and even worse disappointment. At times I was angrily and wildly gesticulating at the insanity going on, so if that's your thing you might get something out of this.

But for anybody looking for a "Vampire virus" style setting, I'd rather suggest The Strain, which at least tries to give the sciences parts a bit more attention and has way better and grittier action.

There's also True Blood out there for those that want more drama and sexy, both of which are also attempted in V-Wars, but heavily fails on, like with pretty much everything else.