What to say about this critical fave? A drug-addicted schizophrenic anarchist hacker takes on the forces of corporatism and global-scale evil in this dark cyberthriller series that never lets the intensity go below 10 for a second. Every scene is intense. Every piece of dialog. People look at each other intensely, or argue and threaten each other intensely. One woman was cast, I'm sure, primarily for her skill at sitting there looking, because it's almost all she does. The show never takes a quiet moment to gather power for the next scene, never lets up. It's just one intense climax to the next, like a Whitney Houston song.
This series reminds me of what took me so long to cotton to "Breaking Bad" for—slow pacing, intensity conveyed with lots of quiet and stillness instead of action. Which, in principle is admirable, and much harder to do well than the opposite. The plot here, however, is labyrinthine, and I found it hard to follow, with an enormous cast of characters and constant complex sturm and drang.
I totally get why it was a critical favorite. It's very inventive on virtually every level, and incredibly well-made. The cinematography is gorgeous, perhaps the best made TV show I've ever seen. Every minute of all 4 seasons looks like a movie, not a TV show. The direction, the acting, the soundtrack, everything is very well done.
And in the occasional moments where it struck a balance I was interested in, it was really great. One or two episodes really stand out.
But a lot of the time... well, it was just a bit much for me. The relentless forward momentum, the intense scene after intense scene after intense scene, plot twist after plot twise after plot twist. It almost was like a kabuki, or an arthouse flick. It has so many consecutive visceral gut-punches that they ceased to have any visceral punch, so much consecutive emotional impact that it ceased to have any impact. And for how incredibly impressive it is, not much happens anywhere in the four seasons of it that made an impression on me that lasted past the end of the episode... for all the intensity and heavy-duty dramaturgy, for the most part, it had no emotional resonance whatsoever for me. I didn't care about the characters. It didn't speak to me.
It also didn't help that it was a transparent and in some ways unoriginal fictionalization of real-life events... it has an Occupy movement (called "fsociety") which wears masks (slightly more like the Monopoly millionaire log than Guy Fawkes), Bitcoin ("e-coin"), etc. But if you're going to use those things, just use them. I don't care about "e-coin wallets". I don't care about "fsociety". I might have actually emotionally connected with a fictionalized story about Bitcoin and Occupy, but they slap a further veneer of artifice over it. That's what the whole series suffers from for me.
Also, strangely, you never really get to see enough emotional range from the characters that you can begin to care about them as people. It's all plotting, and not much character study. I think that might be the big problem I have with it.
I do get why people loved it so much. But, just not really for me. I kept feeling like I should be enjoying it, yet, by and large, it just left me cold.
It's definitely different, though, and definitely incredibly well-made.
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