Mirage

Overall the story is a giant meh. It tries very hard to be important and thrillerish, but ends up being generic and tiresome. The actors are not helping it at all, because they ooze apathy at any given moment, regardless how tense things are becoming. The dialogue is simple, to the point, with no useless emotional elaborations, space for character development, witty lines or anything that would put you in danger of feeling remotely connected or positive to what you're seeing. Basically, everyone just wants to move things along and get them over with.

BUT the desert scenes are beautiful. The shades, the colours, the buildings, the atmosphere they create. It might be a deeply personal thing, I just have something for large spaces filled with pale sand. And oh my goodness - the soundtrack!!! You can just watch the desert shots and listen to the soundtrack, and this could be your ultimate jam! Call me insane, but these are the two things I give 6/10 for. The rest can be recycled.

And all this is served in Abu Dhabi with a German touch... Should/could be something for everyone, but the result is another thriller where renegades and "unsophisticated" specialists attempt to avoid a disaster. As often in (mostly) U. S. series, lenient people become heroes overnight, getting ready for chases and weapons within some hours, and viewers are "confused" using mysterious events and clips from the past... The venue was evidently chosen for their contribution to the series budget :) - although it is exotic and beautiful and makes many to (re)visit the Emirates again.

As for the cast, most performers were unknown to me, except Grégory Fitoussi, but even his role was too ordinary. The leading performances were not too impressive and several characters did not bring additional value to the Series (e.g. Zack and his teen friends). Thus, Mirage has some kind of entertaining value and 6 episodes is not too long, but as there are hundreds of more interesting related series out there, it is not a creation that brings you wow! On novel effects.

The glitzy ex-pat middle east is a big turn off and of course it is a major character as most locations tend to be. But if you can focus past that and get into the emotional heart of the characters then you have some chance of engagement in the thriller aspects of the plot. Marie-Josée Croze, the female lead, holds the screen very well, though some of her motivations were a bit far fetched at times. Clive Standen does tough guy running, fighting, safe breaking, driving dangerously all very well but the emotional close ups are not his forte. Considering this was a coproduction between Euro heavyweights it was not a spectacular success, but remains good, solid viewing that improves as you move through the 6 episodes. Clearly set up for a follow- up series, lets see if they get the cash. I'm sure the cast would like to do it all again.

I had some high hopes for this TV show. The previews looked good so I decided to watch. But I was so angry at how they portrayed the female lead. She is shown to be weak and not very intelligent despite the fact that she is a cyber security engineer. When her first husband is fighting an attacker armed with a knife and gun , instead of helping him clobber the guy, she cowers in a corner until it's over. She is careless about leaving her electronic devices around for enemies to find and place monitor devices on them. Yet she is a cyber security expert. She opens up to a relative stranger about reconnecting with her long lost husband even though she knows the bad guys are trying to locate him. So, of course, this woman, who is wired with a mic, is relaying all this info to the bad guys. They know to follow her now to get to him. Why do these writers/producers continue to portray women as helpless, weak and dumb in films and on TV? Aren't we beyond that by now?

In the trivia section of this series, following information is given:

"The first TV series produced and released as part of The Alliance, a co-production agreement announced in 2018 between European broadcasting groups France Télévisions (France), Rai (Italy) and ZDF (Germany) in order to pool resources and fund ambitious productions to compete with original productions from American streaming services such as Netflix."

if these European giants come together to produce something that is too hard to bear like this one, they shall as well close the shope and leave..

it was tooo bad..

i watched it french dubbed.. it was even more bad.. i assume in the english original some parts are in english, some parts are in french.. so what they did is they only dubbed the parts where english is spoken.. by a dubbing artist other than the leading actress!!! so what happens is suddenly her voice changes as the scenes flow as she swicthes from english to french and vice versa..

and the production, script qualities match the dubbing quality.. such an epic failure!!! such a big flop!!