Partway into the fifth episode of the English-language version, I find once again that all the annoying gimmicks in the production style make this almost unendurable. The content itself is deeply fascinating, a rarely-examined facet of the second world war which definitely does merit much more scrutiny by those interested in history.
But not like this.
Good grief, this looks as though National Geographic (which has long tended toward the self-important anyway, in its presentations) must have had it in mind to see how many annoying and needless distractions it could inject, into telling a story which would have been far better told by allowing the facts to tell it for themselves, rather than insulting the audience's intelligence with all these silly AV tricks.
I don't know if I can even list them all but I'll try:
An entirely unnecessary and melodramatic score, preceded by an excruciating theme song which is embarrassingly out of place with the contents; the constant presentations of archival photos with bad colorization, silly 3D tricks and a continual zoom which all make them less than useless in augmenting the narration and only mocks their authenticity; presenting the guest commentators with lame half-framed closeups and cued, stilted facial expressions, making them all look like reality-TV characters instead of knowledgeable academicians...
But probably the worst bit of very poor composition is the continual return to little packs of Scandinavian treasure-hunters from the present day, with scenes like where they find a bit of cloth in the tundra and sit around congratulating themselves on how this 'proves' a thousand troops were camped nearby, etc, etc. (What this could possibly be meant to add, to the story of a war fought eight decades ago, utterly escapes me...)
If the producers of this catastrophically flawed bit of pretentious show-offery had instead just stuck to the story and told it, rather than making the entire production about all their clever and silly production tricks, this could have been a masterpiece.
Indeed, with anything like genuine regard shown for the lives lost and the sufferings endured, nothing less than a masterpiece was what this story deserved, making this near-cartoon we're presented with instead something careening much closer to ignorant flippancy, a disrespectfully trivializing obscenity.
They managed to make such a mess of it, that it's almost too ridiculous to watch at all.
The actual historic contents are all that saves it, and these take a lot of effort and patience by the viewer to even find, hiding behind all the technical stunts, grave-robbing adventurism, and generally melodramatic oversell.
