starfarts

This is a terrible miniseries, and watching it will steal four hours of your time.

There are two plotlines: a Norwegian family on vacation, with a lesbian daughter and autistic son; and a Norwegian scientist with a brother who both survived 2004 while their parents did not. HIGH STAKES. Except the family plot is entirely--and I mean that in the total, complete sense--surplus.

Anyone who has seen a few disaster movies knows that they always try to narrow the lens of an epic disaster onto some super-serious-business set of characters, almost always with young children, who can "ground" the narrative. Also in every one of those movies, this focus ruins everything. Here, the family is just nonsense drama, a total waste of time, and literally unnecessary in every single way.

After the first half of the first episode I skipped every one of their scenes I could and I was still cheated out of a couple hours. It never gets better, ever, to the last second of the last shot before credits roll. This should have been a 90-minute original movie following the scientist only.

Do the disaster scenes make up for it? No. They look amazing but they're brief (perhaps three or four minutes through all episodes, at most) and are in no way a reward.

Avoid at all costs. Two stars only because the special effects are very well done and the team who created them should be proud.

This movie suffers from what I call the "War of the Worlds" syndrome, whereby an amazing concept and terrific background are created but then almost the entirety of the runtime is hyperfocused on anything but what is interesting. This should have been a war movie, not a cliched drama revolving around journalists.

There are already two embedded journos seen later on; if they were the stars and we got to see the actual WAR unfolding, this would be damn near a 10/10. But it's not. The best parts are over in a few seconds; for example, night gunfights in the distance, Apaches doing Apache things, tanks rolling in DC, and so on.

The way this is structured is simply cowardice on behalf of the makers. Give me a front row view of what is actually happening. That would have actually been an impactful experience, because I've seen too many films and I'm far too old to be impressed by corpses hanging from overpasses.

Ten minutes into the first episode and I was hooked completely. I love me some footie, simple as, and what happened to Özil should be criminal--to me that's the obvious foundation for this story. I'm also a huge fan of Felix Kramer's character, he gave me serious Rake vibes. You know, the tornado of bad decisions, misfortune, and fornication where things just barely work out.

I binged the whole series in one day and each episode I was more excited for than the last. Terrific acting, great dialogue (both in German and the subtitles), and really interesting side plots made this a compelling watch and I didn't regret it...until the last episode and a half. You see, there's a certain event that was foreshadowed from the very beginning of the series and subsequently in the beginning of each episode that I couldn't wait to see happen; essentially the other episodes reveal the buildup to how this event occurred. Unfortunately the further in I got, the more I realized the 20+ subplots were never going to be realized. And once that specific event went down in the final episode I was incredibly disappointed. The lack of a violent body count frustrated me, but more than that it was cheaply produced and weak. I'm fine with series working within limited budgets, but when literally all of it builds to a penultimate sequence and it feels worse than a TV commercial I can't be satisfied. Compounding all that is a tremendous amount of narrative threads that aren't resolved. And by that I mean literally all of them, including the central string.

I know writing an end is very difficult, particularly if it's expected to be continued, but to have ZERO endings to ANYTHING says to me that it should never have been made in the first place. Your mileage may vary, but be prepared for new and interesting plots to be introduced even into the final episode and then left hanging. Since it's 2024 and this came out six years ago, there's really no hope.