Django

But it's not.

Assuming you have HDR on your TV and you can see what is happening...

The story is convoluted and the flashbacks not handled very well.

The acting is very variable, even by the recognised names.

While the photography is good, it does not make up for the bad acting. Characters performances vary between wooden to manic.

And the accents. Very poor, especially Ms Rapace, most distracting.

The Django character has appeared in several spaghetti westerns over the last fifty years. This series does follow in the established genre but has sacrificed clarity for pretentiousness.

If they make a remake, remember to turn the lights on.

Noomi rapace actually does suck in her role, what was she thinking?, absolute terrible 'accent', could she really not know this?, is she really this vacuous?, I guess!, many others have said the scenes are too dark, very true, in the dark scenes some of the cast cannot be seen, ?, the writer and the director are terrible, it's just not worthy of watching, kind of a fever dream, funny, the names of those involved in writing and directing seem to be Italian, is this a satire of the old spaghetti westerns?, is that it?, I just gave up in the middle of episode two, skip this disaster of a dumb show.

Actually, I awarded this series a total of eight stars but I chose to use white ones for the last six as an homage to art.

If world famous paintings like "Black Cat at Midnight in a Coal Bin" tickles your fancy then you'll not want to miss a riveting second of this attempt at art. For me, however, I don't think I should have to sit in a completely dark room and strain my eyes to watch a made for TV series.

Once again the choice to record in visible light (because, well, we can now) was chosen over allowing the audience the opportunity to actually be able to follow the story instead of needing to guess who that shadow actually is and what is he (or she) doing. I threw in the towel after, roughly, fifteen minutes of this and moved on to something else.

Normally, I'd post a review against the last episode of the season unless I was sure that it's not going to be renewed, but I'm going to post this here as, even if "Django" is brought back for another run - which doesn't look likely - I don't think I'm going to be around for anymore if it. Not everything has to be sunshine and rainbows, but this is too long and too dour to recommend.

Having left his homestead to fight for the South in the Civil war, Django (Matthais Schoenaerts) returns home to find most of his family dead, he believes though that his daughter survived and begins to search for her. 8 years later he locates Sarah (Lisa Vicari), living with John Ellis (Nicholas Pinnock) who has founded a free city, New Babylon, on land gifted to him. However, Elizabeth Thurman (Noomi Rapace) wants the land returned to her family, and as a devoutly religious person, to see New Babylon wiped from the map.

So, I quite liked the look for the show, though for an Italian production they generally stayed away from the classic Spaghetti Western style heading to Romania for a grittier, muddier look. New Babylon is clearly filmed in an old mine. I didn't think performances were that bad, Rapace has rather a wayward accent, but we're still in the period of mass migration so it could perhaps be excused on those grounds.

It wasn't a fun watch though. I've never seen the film it's based on (Franco Nero does appear in this series) but the plot is very different from what I read on Wikipedia. This story was too long, it might have worked better as a 90-minute film but at ten hours there were too many half-done storylines and repeated plot points to keep me from drifting away every time I watched it. It's pretty grim stuff too, not that explicit, but with a prevailing sadness particularly if, like me, you guess a pivotal plot point before it comes to the fore.

Again, it's for this reason that I don't think I'd settle in for another series.

I'm from Belgium, so I know Matthias Schoonaerts is a very good actor. However, in this series his acting limits itself to raising his head very slowly while desperately trying to look like a bad ass and making short grunts and growls which I hope weren't in the script.

I'm focussing at Schoonaerts because he played Django, but the other characters in this series perform on the same level. They can do better. I know they can. I recognise most of them from other programs where they did a fine job!

It's not just the acting though. The whole cinematography is a bit off. The footage is either too dark or even a bit too shakey. At first I didn't know what it was I didn't like about it. It's that subtle.

And last but not least: the story. It's just not strong enough to play in the same league as the Django westerns the producers are aiming for.

Pity.