DirkDiamond

Avoid like the plague

I've been extremely selective with series lately, after being burned too many times. You name it - shows cancelled halfway through, main actors binned out of nowhere, direction yanked off course mid-run, or a whole new writing team clearly fresh out of a university workshop fumbling the tone. I've wasted hours on garbage like that, so I swore I'd be more careful. Thought I'd nailed it this time with Yellowstone. Turns out, I was dead wrong.

Got halfway through Season 5 - which, by the way, had its own weird mid-season break - only to discover it suddenly wraps up one thread, then throws itself into a half-baked rewrite because of a spat between Kevin Costner and the showrunner. Result? He's written out. Off screen. Just gone. And the story takes a wild detour to patch over it. Are you kidding me?

If I'd known any of that upfront, I'd have never touched it. I actively avoided House of Cards for exactly this kind of thing - messy behind-the-scenes drama bleeding all over the final product - and I thought Yellowstone was safe. Apparently not. Massive failure on all fronts.

Now I've got to sit with the fact that I've sunk seventy-odd hours into something that unravels itself just as it's hitting stride. And all because they couldn't sort out their off-screen drama like professionals. It's yet another example of why investing your time in long-form series is a total gamble. A waste. I'm absolutely livid. And somehow I'd missed all the warning signs, which is baffling given how much noise this kind of stuff usually makes online.

Seriously. Don't touch it. Not worth your time, your energy, or your trust.

Apart from a few movie injury scenes, revealing red sauce and stick in swellings, this movie looks very good in 4k. I didn't much like it before, as seen on VHS, and similarly lacking DVD, but upon jumping over it's Bluray release I was able to enjoy it a lot more than I had previously, now in 4k.

I was able to appreciate the cinematography a lot more, really does look good, and I found myself a lot more invested in the story under these conditions.

It's definitely not perfect, but so much better than I previously thought, normally getting a 2/10 sometimes 3, and I held onto that for a while, but find myself very pleased to be able to appreciate it in a wholly different way.

Anyway, it's well worth seeing in 4K, and I would suggest avoiding it in any other format. The story should have been able to hold up, but for some reason didn't really grab me before.

Takes up a whole special feature disk on the 4k box set for Game of Thrones. Seeming to indicate something special was forthcoming, but this is really bad. Back story worthy of its own full scale presentation, maybe, which Season 1 of House of Dragons has indicated, not Season 2 though, sadly. Maybe it further helps us understand some significant developments towards the end of GOT Season 8, some seemingly all of a sudden developments. Its low budget to an extent it closely represents the work of a youtube hobbyist, or something like that.

It has some aspects that indicate a restrained talent, it seems, perhaps some kind of horribly unreasonable production time limitation, giving us nothing but a slightly more giving story board presentation. Actually, reminds me of a PowerPoint presentation, more than a meaningful, storied animation.