The English Review

★★★½

Watched Nov 12, 2022

Starts off quite strong, with some amazing visuals, a very VERY strong cast, good writing, some tense moments, pretty much a slam dunk. But in the last 2 episodes it kinda falls apart, in some weird ways.

Important characters die off-screen with little-to-no meaning to the story, the pacing starts to suffer, the action jumps from scene to scene with very little connective tissue and there’s some awkwardly integrated flashback scenes. There's an increasing number of small details and clumsy choices that drags down the overall impact of the show.

It's also a strangely structured show, with some things being intentionally obfuscated whilst others just feel vague or ill-defined. No inherent problem with this type of storytelling, and it works in Westworld, but the 'reveals' don't really justify or even benefit the story told here, it just distracts from the elements that shine, such as:

• Great performances from most everyone, Blunt and Spencer do the heavy lifting (with some difficult scenes, especially for Blunt), bolstered by great supporting/cameo roles by Ciarán Hinds, Toby Jones and Stephen Rea, among others. Rafe Spall steals the show with a psycho combo of Ben Foster + Sam Rockwell. He's almost too good and it's kinda wasted in the contrived / strange finale.
• Some truly amazing visuals and vistas, sometimes maybe even bordering on kitsch, but they knew what they were doing. The story(telling) often feels clunky but it's probably worth watching for cinematography alone.
• Great moments and scenes that work well in isolation. Director has a strong grasp of creating tension, with some good subtle violin music along the way (reminiscent once again of Westworld, but not as memorable).

There's probably an amazing 3-4 hour cut of this show that solves most of my issues. It does feel like a show that ran into some troubles in the post-production process, because the dip in quality for the last episodes is pretty severe. If I had to guess, they either ran out of time or, for some reason, had to make compromises with the story (maybe they had 8 episodes planned but had to compress everything to 6?). That's the only way I can explain some of the weird and rushed plotting in the final act.

Last nitpick, the show uses some modern music in a few instances and it doesn’t really work. Maybe if I didn’t know some of the songs or had not already heard them in shows like House M.D., it wouldn’t have bothered me. But in the context of this very self-serious show, it just felt self-indulgent or catering to modern audiences. Some of the songs work better than others, but it still took me waaay out of the show.

Overall, this is an archetypal example of “lesser than the sum of its parts”, but some of those parts are really good, enough to warrant a watch if you enjoy modern westerns, the aesthetic or just want some great over-the-top acting.

Thank you to @nex3 for making this cool formatter and helping me out with it!


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