russcampbell-1

I started watching Island at War without checking on how many seasons it had and as I got to the end of season one, I realized there was no season two. It was canceled for whatever reason. But the series was excellent with excellent writing and acting and so I don't have any idea why it wasn't picked up, but I suppose it was ratings. Lawrence Fox plays a German airman who thinks Hitler is bad for Germany and that there should have been no war, but can't get out of doing his duty without getting shot, so he keeps at it. When I was checking to see about any additional seasons for the show here on IMDb, I happened to look at his IMDb record. He played a Nazi in this series, but one who was enlightened and opposed to Hitler. After looking at his record in IMDb.com, I realize he's more like the Nazis than I would've thought. I think he would've made a good Nazi from the way he speaks and the quotes that were put into the system. Very sad.

Go with the positive reviews. The naysayers are wrong. One person criticizes differences from the book. Oh, gee, that's never happened before, right? The acting is great, the story is compelling, and if it's different in some ways from the book, so what? Both can be good. It does present the challenges women faced in the patriarchal 50s. Perfectly? Is anything ever perfect? But no one can honestly say women didn't face some of the exact chauvinistic attitudes portrayed in the series. Stupidity and arrogance from men. Misogyny. And too many women willingly invested in that system. This show is well worth your time.

I doubt anybody from Netflix will ever see this, but it would be nice if they did. I feel the main problem with this series is that they made a bad choice in regards to dubbing. Dubbing itself is fine and I actually prefer it sometimes, because I might be watching something at lunch or while doing some chores and I can't have my eyes on the TV every second to read subtitles. So dubbing is more convenient. But they chose American actors to do it and American accents coming out of a Japanese body is odd. They should've had Japanese voice actors speaking the lines in English, but with a standard Japanese accent. Granted, the people in that situation were not speaking English. They were speaking Japanese in the way Japanese speak Japanese, but many Japanese can speak English and, of course, they generally do it with a Japanese accent. English with a Japanese accent is not the perfect situation, but it's a little closer to reality. The perfect situation is we all understand Japanese, but since that's not happening, English with a Japanese accent seems a better choice. It gives you more of a flavor than all these Japanese people speaking English with American accent. I saw one person talking about the acting being kind of wooden, and that may be true to a certain extent, but I think it's made to seem worse since the voice actors just can't match up with the feelings and expressions that the Japanese actors may have had. And then the American accent just kind of compounds it. I'd say you couldn't fully judge the acting unless you understand Japanese and watch the Japanese version of this.