Citadelle

Y'all know the trope of an amnesic spy is that we audience gotta discover the protagonist's backstory together with him, right? Why on earth would you begin the show with a complete flashback? There might be plot twists and betrayals down the road, but you also need to entice the audience to keep watching to see that happen.

Besides starring Richard Madden as discount Matt Damon, we also have Stanley Tucci being a discount Mark Strong. Sounds familiar? Good-guy independent spy agency? Add a sprinkle of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, and you get this utter lack of originality show.

Also what kind of incompetent spy agency keeps a list of all their agents and black sites in one document, and all their secrets together in literally one briefcase?

Not impressed.

For now, just a big parade of shallow clichés.

Maybe it's an attempt to bring a teenage audience closer to spy genre. The intended audience would then justify the insubstantial plot, the characters' constant explanations of what's going on, the TikTok editing, and an almost cynical lack of engagement with the real world. By the way, do these plots involving nuclear artifacts still make sense? Why don't screenwriters experiment with contexts closer to the experiences of the new generations, such as pesticides, industrial secrets in medicine and food, disputes over geolocation data, etc.? Why not explicitly place industries and their business interests at the center of the story rather than these government agencies with their political overtones?

Boring.

There were some undoubtedly good moments as this series set up, unfortunately, the further the series went the less promise it showed.

This is tricky, I really wanted to like Citadel, and I did like the first episode.

It's a little tempting to think that this is what happens when you throw too much money at something and don't make it work hard enough to earn that money and develop.

True there was some classic spy action - but with only a few exceptions this wasn't really groundbreaking stuff. Also true that an element of predictability crept into the show the further it went.

What we ended up with is a show that absolutely looks the part, but that when all is said and done is less the sum of its parts, whereas at a rumored $300 million it should clearly have been more - much more.

Citadel is another sad example of a show that chose form over function - looking good, rather than really getting the razor to the story and whittling and revising until something fresh and entertaining remains - new twists on old tails.

Let's hope they learn the lesson for season 2.

This is an initial review of the first episode of this series.

While this is an intriguing concept in the vein of Jack Ryan/Jason Bourne and the many spy adaptations that have been brought to the big and small screen lately, it fails to live up to the hype.

The first thing that jumped out to me about this series was the cringy-ness of the dialogue and the lazy plot writing. The initial meeting in the trail between the two main characters debuts with very poorly written dialogue that felt like it was trying way too hard to be clever. The action scenes that followed were pretty well executed, but nothing I haven't seen before.

The plot tropes that followed have been seen in a ton of spy movies/series already, it felt like a soft-boiled crowd-sourced spy series where they threw a bunch of heavily-used spy tropes in a blender to make something basic and unimaginative.

The bottom line is that this series has failed to find a unique identity and very much risks being forgotten over time. The action scenes were pretty good but the characters seem to be basic and unmemorable so far. To be fair, it's very early in the series. But unless is seen something unique from a story perspective that captures my attention, I am not going to waste my time watching further. I hope things improve but I'm not optimistic.

Probably the script was written by ChatGPT. They fed the program with some famous spy movies, took out its soul and that was it. It's worse than shows with one-twentieth of the budget. Where did they put $300 million? And making jokes about another movie doesn't change the fact that it's copy and cliché like when the protagonist's wife says he's not Jason Bourne just to alleviate the plagiarism. The scene where the protagonist goes to retrieve equipment that his enemies have been looking for eight years is embarrassing. My mother going to buy bread at the bakery is more exciting. Boring and copy of the copy of the copy of other movies. Not to mention the numerous plot holes and absurdities. I gave 3 because of the good actors.