The Witcher - Season 1 Review

ah Hollywood when they're not making disgustingly out-of-touch self-aggrandizing political speeches rigged ceremonies where they basically reward each other for being the best at pretending things literally minutes after they were gloriously mocked for doing that very same thing they enjoy nothing better than chasing a good trend because you know making good original content for purely artistic reasons and allowing it to stand on its own merits regardless of what's currently considered cool isn't wrote insults owned operates that's the magic of cinema folks whenever a movie or TV show puts on its big-boy pants and somehow manages to muscle its way past the doorman and into the warm glow of success tavern it's not long before a just lling crowd of lesser imitators try to follow in its wake each of them eager to chug down that sweet beer of advertising revenue and awkwardly flirt with the hot bar maids of awards season just as the unexpected success of Star Wars inspired a slew of derivative sci-fi movies back in the 1980s Shipman is basically the reason Star Trek returned from the grave so the triumph of Game of Thrones in the past few years has triggered a similar effect in TV as Studios fall over themselves to find thousand-page fantasy novels written by overweight bearded men with extremely slow work ethics to plaster all over our screens like a tidal wave of jizz over the next year we can look forward to TV adaptations of the Lord of the Rings The Wheel of Time Conan the Barbarian The Dark Tower shadow and bone and a bunch of others I don't give a [ __ ] about the point is everyone wants to be the next Game of Thrones which brings me neatly along to the topic of today's video The Witcher a fantasy adventure series about a monster hunter named Geralt of Rivia based on a series of books by this guy now I can't say I'm too familiar with the book series but I do know I'm a big fan of The Witcher video games they were violent gritty filled with swearing and copious nudity and laced with a dry sense of gallows humor a bit like Christmas in the drinker household then anyway I was interested to see what they might do with TV adaptation whether it would manage to create a compelling yet believable fantasy world or tumble off into madness and farce whether it would stay true to the dark grim and unforgiving source material or succumb to the recent trend of forcing walk progressive diversity culture politics into stories and settings that are completely inappropriate and as it turns out it actually does a bit of everything allow me to explain silhouette sure is certain your typical medieval fantasy world of magic monsters and mayhem the story centers around Geralt of Rivia a genetically enhanced monster hunter known as a Witcher not to be confused with an actual witch or a witch hunter which are totally different things in this universe that just happened to share the same name Geralt travels from place to place as a kind of hired sword slash pest controller killing dangerous creatures for money he's also a bit of an [ __ ] who treats everyone else like [ __ ] drinks too much takes drugs to make him stronger beats up people who annoy him sleeps indiscriminately with women and basically won't get out of bed in the morning unless there's a bag of coins in it for him it's nice to see myself reflected on-screen at last representation matters people Garrett's various misadventures bring him into contact with yennefer a beautiful but jaded sorceress with ambitions of power who's also trying to find a cure to the infertility that resulted from the removal of her hunchback ism of the it worse to be honest Gera also becomes the protector of ciri a young princess with mysterious magical powers who is forced to flee when her kingdom gets conquered by an invading army led by an evil mage that used to work with yennefer and she spends most of the seasons trying to find girl and fulfill her destiny it's so simple right wrong unfortunately it's a bit more complex than that see the events in this season are shown out of sequence depending on the character you're following one scene may have happened months years or even decades before the scene that follows it but some characters also span multiple timelines and interact with each other at various points to set up future events I'm gonna have to go some to make sense so hold on to your laxatives because I'm gonna dump a lot of [ __ ] in the next few minutes Syria is probably the easiest storyline to follow because all takes place in the same time period she's a teenage princess that's been living in kind of a sheltered life in the kingdom of sintra protected by her grandmother queen : the-- even though she looks maybe 20 years older than siri and i genuinely thought she was her mom until like the fifth episode i guess i wasn't paying enough attention then but then the nilfgaard empire invades for reasons and there's a big battle and central losses and quinn currently gets badly wounded in the fight sing [ __ ] what are you doing there's a very logical reason why generals monarchs and senior military commanders direct their armies from the rear it keeps them safe so they can issue orders and reposition troops without constantly having to worry about dying do you have any idea how easy it is to get killed in a medieval battle why would you risk the fate of your entire army and nation by fighting on the front line where you could die at any moment also you're a slender middle-aged woman that looks like she can barely even lift the sword how much use do you think you'd be in a massed infantry engagement but the script says nah it'll be fine so that's good enough for me anyway so enough guards stormed the capital and currently tell Siri to find garel of Rivia for reasons then she gets sad and falls on a window and Siri runs away but she hooks up with The Fresh Prince of Rivendell and goes for a walk in a forest and wait why the [ __ ] are elves no black for that matter why are there conspicuously large numbers of ethnically diverse people in basically every scene and location when it makes absolutely no sense for a show set in a very obviously northern european climates I mean I could understand things like the Council of mages drawn people from every corner of the world but how the [ __ ] did this guy end up working in sintra or this guy or these people Game of Thrones had a pretty diverse cast too but it was done in a way that made sense in the context of the worlds black and Asian actors tended to play characters from hot sunny countries like Dorne and esos because that's where people like that would naturally have evolved but when you get to cold dark places like Winterfell you can guess the kind of people that have adapted to live there they even comment on this in the later seasons when the northerners are exposed to people of different races and they're kind of wary and curious about them it allowed the show to cast diverse actors in an organic way that played within the rules of the worlds but in the whitshire everyone's just kind of piled in together and nobody seems to think this is strange or unusual and if I didn't know better I say this was done because the show runners wanted diversity but they couldn't think of a way to make it work within the limitations of the witcher universe so they just said [ __ ] it and did it anyway so series getting chased by the nilfgaard army because she's important to them for reasons and every so often she'll get angry and sent her a magical blast that [ __ ] up everyone in her vicinity clearly she's got some kind of power that could be dangerous but she doesn't understand its nature or limitations Jennifer's story is probably the longest of the bunch because it spans like three decades and it's divided into two parts the first part shows her as a crippled and deformed teenager who gets sold to a traveling mage by her abusive father lovely stuff kind of reminds me of my childhood anyway she's recruited against her will into a magical Academy for gifted youngsters you're a wizard Harry [ __ ] off Harry Parr initially she struggles to master the force sorry chaos and fuck-a-doodle-doo she's not just instantly better and more popular than everyone else she struggles to learn even basic skills she gets mocked and belittled because she looks like the [ __ ] hunchback of notre damn and she takes her own ability she even tries to kill herself at one point but this kind of adversity gradually toughen her up and makes her more determined she learns from her failures and shortcomings slowly becoming stronger as a result I'm not doing it star horse is dead to me anyway there's plotting and scheming and everyone spying on everyone else and people get turned into eels for some reason but eventually yennefer finishes her training and becomes a powerful sorceress mission accomplished skip forward 30 years and yennefer seems to have everything she ever wanted she's beautiful and desired by everyone and she works as a royal adviser to kings and queens but she's bored and disenchanted with her life and when an assassination attempt results in the death of a baby in her care she becomes preoccupied with having children of her own the problem is the old matey's are infertile so she ends up traveling the world in search of a cure of some kind thus when she bumps into Geralt and they have a few adventures together and then they [ __ ] but then they're pulled apart by the growing conflict with nilfgaard Geralt meanwhile is the glue that holds all of this together the narrative generally focuses on him as he travels from place to place meeting people and killing things he's hired to take out some creature that's been terrorizing the local population he does some investigating and ultimately discovers the creature is less to blame for the situation than the people who created it what's that you devilishly insightful screenplay human greed jealousy and ambition are the true monsters in this world you're just blowing us away with the originality now aren't you but there's also a growing revelation of Garrett's involvement with ciri over the years and the events that led up to the invasion by nilfgaard all three of these timelines eventually catch up with each other and coalesce around a big final battle to try to stop nilfgaard invading the rest of the continent and save the world and that's it that's basically season 1 of The Witcher so what the hell do we make of all of this well I went into the witcher expecting a solid but fairly predictable fantasy shop that would deliver plenty of violence and nudity and wouldn't asked too much of its viewers and while i was correct about the violence in the nudity part my expectations were well and truly subverted when it came to the rest of its the witcher is a complex and demanding short that requires you to pay attention and retain lots of information to understand what's happening and this is no easy task for a man with alcohol and juiced brain damage there's no hand-holding with this one it doesn't ease you in with lots of comforting exposition and world-building in the opening episodes you're just thrown straight into the story and expected to figure it out and to be honest I think that's to his detriment it expects a little too much from the audience right off the bat but I'll get more into that later firstly I will say there are things this show does exceptionally well starting with the characters I was kind of unsure about Henry Cavill when he was first announced as Geralt and the early promotional images didn't exactly fill me with confidence but actually seeing him in action you can tell he really gets the character he's gruff and dismissive he drinks too much sleeps with prostitutes and clearly doesn't have a problem killing people who piss him off this is not the kind of guy who organizes over the morality of what he does and he never indulge ease in pity yourself doubt that being said there's just enough humanity beneath it all to give him an redeeming edge when he's hired to deal with monsters he'll do what he can to avoid killing them went friends are injured or in trouble he'll risk his life and make heavy sacrifices to help the moment he respects the value of promises and oaths even when it works against him in short he's hard and ruthless Balta mattli a fair and honorable man yennefer is the stand-out of the show for me she's more powerful than garel but also more flawed and complex and human she came from basically nothing clawing her way up through a mixture of hard work and natural ability but once she guess what she wants she gradually realizes that none of it really makes her happy and perhaps it wasn't worth what she sacrificed to get there where ever seen this kind of character development before she goes through a pretty remarkable journey over the course of the series going from a naive and desperate young woman to a powerful but unhappy sorceress to a jaded and cynical gun-for-hire searching the world for a way to cure herself and finally to a reluctant hero willing to sacrifice everything to help others it's an excellent piece of characterization and I'll give the show props for developing her into a complex multi-layered character ciri on the other hand is fine but kind of bland overall she's probably the least interesting of the big three and the script doesn't really ask that much of her she's more of an objective that everyone's fighting over rather than an independent character with her own agency they obviously wanted an actress who could convey a mixture of childish innocence and adult wisdom and I think they found a good one in Freya Allen she's 18 in real life but Sheila's way younger on-screen although she's got that weird creepy blonde thing going on where it looks like she's got no eyebrows there's also you skier a traveling minstrel that hooks up with Jarrell and becomes a kind of reluctant friend to him he's not one of the major players in the story but I'm gonna mention him here because he pisses me off so much I honestly can't make up my mind whether I like this guy or absolutely hate him clearly he's there to give Geralt someone to play off and although the contrast between the two characters makes for some funny scenes [ __ ] merely could turn him down a bit and what really boils my piss is that he talks and acts like he just walked off the street and present-day I know he's supposed to be the voice of the audience but it's two marches to hyperactive and it tries too hard to be funny all the time and as we know from experience when you have to try hard to be funny well you're not very funny on that subject though the show does manage to capture the dark irreverent sense of humor from the books and games even during heavy dramatic moments when lives are at stake characters still manage to toss off deadpan one-liners providing some much-needed levity fantasy always runs the risk of becoming pompous and silly when it takes itself too seriously but The Witcher never falls into that trap in terms of production value and direction this season is well mostly fine the fight scenes are nice and brutal although I can't help but think a few less jump cuts would have been good castles and cities look convincing enough and there are some gorgeous landscape shots in the later episodes that I assume were real places that being said the CGI is probably a step down from Game of Thrones especially when it comes to creature effects that sure managed to use it sparingly in its first few seasons because there really wasn't the budget for it but The Witcher is based around killing monsters so there's really no option here and yeah some of them look pretty [ __ ] fake like the dragon and well whatever the [ __ ] this thing's meant to be anyway that's enough playing with my food let's get into the real meat of this criticism there are two major problems with The Witcher and both of them kind of feed off each other the first is the way in which it tells this story I said before that the story is told in non chronological order and broad terms this means we start about three quarters of the way through then jump backwards gradually working our way back to that original point before going beyond it to get to the resolution the reason for this I guess is to recontextualize the nature of certain characters and their relationships gradually shedding light on events and decisions that don't seem to make much sense initially it introduces kind of a mystery that has to be solved or the writers got a big old attack of the brainy Fox and wanted to show how smartly were unfortunately this kind of complex story talent requires finesse narrative skill experience and a keen sense of how much information the audience can retain [ __ ] it also relies on us having a good understanding of the world and the characters that live in it which brings me neatly along to the second big problem the world building si world building is extremely important in fantasy for obvious reasons we don't know anything about the world the story takes place in what are the rules of this place what kind of people live in it how do they interact with each other what are the major factions and nations and cities is there anything that happened in recent history that affects the world as it stands now these are all important questions that need to be answered one way or another because if you don't understand the world the story happens then then there's no context for what's going on and it becomes impossible to get invested in it god help me I hate to praise Game of Thrones for anything these days but one of the show's biggest narrative accomplishments was to establish its fictional world quickly and efficiently within the first few episodes of season 1 most people with half a brain had a working knowledge of the major locations factions and characters in Westeros they understood roughly where things were who was on which side who was in charge and who was on the run because we understood the mechanics of the world and the stakes involved we were able to quickly and easily get invested in the story good world building provides a way in for the audience but this is where the Witcher really falls down instead of taking some time to help us understand the way things are in this world it just kind of launches itself into the story with no preparation before you know it armies are fighting and cities are burning and people are jumping out of [ __ ] windows and none of it means anything because I don't know who any of these people are or what any of them want or why they're fighting each other I don't know why the villains want to find ciri or why ciri is sent to find Garrow or why some elves are forced to live as outlaws but others seem to be working alongside humans like it's totally cool Gareth goes from place to place fighting monsters but I don't know where he is because there's no sense of the geography of this world he just wanders into generic villages where the weather and the buildings and the clothes all look pretty much the same basically what I'm saying with all this pitch is that you can compromise some storytelling as long as you've got a strong and consistent world or you can compromise on the world building if you tell a strong and compelling story but you can't sacrifice them both and expect people to buy in to it and this is the problem that lies at the core of The Witcher yeah it eventually does get it [ __ ] together and answers most of these outstanding questions and as long as you're willing to suffer through the first few episodes there's definitely a compelling story here it's just that you really have to invest the time and effort to get to it and I can't help but feel the writers have made this [ __ ] a lot harder than it needed to be I think the show also suffers from using some of the weakest source material available from what I understand the first season has been cobbled together from a collection of short stories and it shows it's fragmented and confusing and badly in need of a stronger backbone to hold it all together it feels like what it is a back story establishing the characters and setting the stage for a narrative that hasn't really started yet and that's a hell of a risky way to start off a new show overall then The Witcher seems like a short with a lot of potential that hasn't really come into its own yet sure that's holding back it's best stuff for future seasons there might be a smart move in the long term but it's also a pretty risky gamble considering this half a dozen other shows just like here waiting to force their way into that tavern of success honestly though I do find myself hoping the gamble pays off because display is many faults I kind of like The Witcher it's flawed and unrefined and the heavy-handed diversity starts to grate on the nerves at times but it captures the spirit of the characters and the world pretty effectively and I think there's a decent show lurking beneath the confused narrative and the shoddy world building it'll be interesting to see if it actually manages to struggle out in season 2 anyway that's all I've got for today go away now

Channel: The Critical Drinker

Views: 1,012,488

Rating: 4.7807031 out of 5

Keywords: Henry Cavill, Geralt of Rivia, Nilfgaard, Temeria, Yennifer

Id: IecVgTAzaRM

Length: 20min 4sec (1204 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 10 2020