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!

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.

I was impressed by the historical accuracy of 'Hernán' in spite of what I thought were too many flash-backs and flash-forwards. The series presents what I think is a balanced approach to the Conquest (or Invasion) of México. The Spaniards are neither heroes nor villains, but men in search of wealth, and the Mexica (not 'Aztecs', thank God) are neither savages nor victims, but men defending their homes against superior fire power. I particularly liked the appropriate use of the Nahuatl and Mayas languages in addition to Spanish, even though all three must have changed significantly in the last 500 years (about the same period of time that English has evolved from Shakespeare) NOTE: the word 'Aztec' was not used by anyone at the time of the Conquest, but came into use almost 300 years later, ina history of México published in Italy by a Franciscan who had be expelled from México.

I really wanted to like this series, but with all of the flashbacks and jumps forward in time, I'm getting seasick. Just tell a story and don't try to be so clever. They make this same mistake in the series El Marginal.

This playing around with the timeline isn't clever; it's highly annoying and takes away from what could have been a great narrative. They have squandered a big budget and some fine actors by resorting to film school tricks.

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.