Karl Aksel

This is in all likelihood the fault of. Len Deighton, author of the novel, which I have not read. But when you make a TV adaptation of nonsense, I suppose nonsense is what you can expect.

In this series, the nazis have allied with the Soviets, for some reason. At first I thought it a bit odd that Russians and Germans should be meeting on British soil, as if they were chummy - but when I saw banners extravagantly celebrating Karl Marx, I realised what was going on: the writers had no knowledge of WWII history whatsoever.

Yes, Hitler entered a non-aggression pact with Stalin. The reason for this had nothing to do with all the things they had in common - which could be counted on Captain Hook's bad hand - but with Hitler's need for a quick victory in Poland. This non-aggression treaty took everyone else by surprise, because it was so anti-thetical to everything the nazis stood for. Hitler never intended to honour it, and indeed, no one really expected him to.

But even before Hitler's violation of the pact, when he pretended to be Stalin's friend, there is no way in hell the nazis would have allowed a banner celebrating Karl Marx in any of their territories. This series - and possibly the book it is based on - shows a disturbing lack of historical knowledge by even entertaining the notion that something like this would be possible. It's about as likely as the US allying with Japan, had the attack on Pearl not happened.

In SS-GB Hitler has invaded Britain. In actual history, however, he never had any plans to do so. Operation Sealion was meant as a last resort to bring Britain to its knees, but Hitler had no desire to even fight the British, let alone occupy them. The Battle of Britain took place because Britain, in honouring their agreement with Poland, had declared war on Germany. Hitler needed to subjugate the British in order to carry out his actual plans, which was always the invasion of Russia. Bolshevism was always Hitler's enemy #1, bar none, as he saw it as the biggest threat to civilisation. Even his hatred of the Jews came second to this. The reason the Jews were so dangerous, in his mind, was precisely their plot to spread Bolshevism. Somehow he managed to combine this with Jews being responsible for American-style capitalism as well, but then the extremes of the political spectrum have never been famed for rational thought.

Of the series' drama itself, I can offer no opinion. Because I have more than a passing knowledge of the real events, the flaws in the alternate history backdrop were simply too grating. Sometimes it is all too obvious why someone writes *alternative* history: Deighton wanted to write war fiction with nazis as the main villains, and he figured no one could call him out on inaccuracies if he went for a "what if" scenario.

Ok, first of all: this is a good movie on its own merits. It's got good writing, good pacing and is engaging for what it is. But odds are you're not going to like it if you know your history, and if you don't, this movie isn't going to teach you anything.

The problem, however, is that it tries to deal with two different subject matters at once. It tries to be about the Battle of Narvik, but it also tries to be about the fate of civilians - in particular it tries to show how people could be pushed to collaboration, even though there's only the one example. And this seems to be the main focus of the movie. Had the title been more honest, this would have been a better movie. We are only offered a couple of skirmishes to represent the actual battles, and these skirmishes lack any sense of scale. The landing at Bjerkvik, for example, is represented by a small handful of Norwegians along with 4-5 French and 2-3 Polish soldiers, fighting against 5-10 Germans defending a single railway gun which looked to be no heftier than an 88. And this was the biggest engagement shown.

I don't think I saw a single British soldier in any of the skirmishes - there were a total of three - and the entire Allied operation seemed to hinge on the ability of a single woman to gather intelligence for two British consuls hiding in a shack. If that sounds silly it's because it is.

In the end, I give it a 6/10 because it's an engaging movie - but also quite the disappointment. Had they ommitted all the "battle" scenes, focused entirely on the female protagonist and her struggle between doing right by her family or right by her country, and not pretended this was a movie about the Battle of Narvik, this would have been a better movie.

Look, if you're going to shoot in South Africa, why try for an arctic setting at all? It's just the opening scene which contains snow anyway (which is actually just sand digitally coloured white), the rest is just the same dry, desert setting we've seen in previous movies. The graboids and assblasters look exactly like they did in the previous movie (and like the previous movie, no shriekers), and the graboid can leap through the air, just like in Bloodlines. Nothing new has been added, it is essentially Bloodlines, shot in a slightly different way.

The acting was subpar all around; even Michael Gross failed to convince me he wanted to be in this movie. In the first scene he's in, he is visited by a taxman who does his best at faking a Texan accent, but it was so weird that I had to find out where he was actually from - that's how I found out the shooting location was South Africa.

The concept of an arctic graboid is great, and an arctic shrieker or ass-blaster would see heat signatures extremely well against the frozen landscape - but this obvious strength was never exploited. All opportunities of an arctic setting were utterly wasted. This is a movie which fails to justify its existence.