2/11/2024 0 Comments Vsee reviewsEidinger, a wonderfully weird German actor best known in the U.S. Laurie is fine but underutilized as a turn-of-the-century dandy shellshocked into seclusion by the horrors he experienced in the First World War-an intriguing character, but one viewers barely get to know. But poorly paced scripts, cluttered with inopportune flashbacks to Marie and Werner’s childhoods, kill any momentum it generates in the present.Įven more distracting is the show’s squandering of a talented cast. The two seem destined to meet, and you’d better believe that in a story this predictable they will, but under what circumstances? Will Werner save Marie or bring about her demise? And will he get to her before Nazi jewel plunderer Reinhold von Rumpel (Lars Eidinger) comes looking for the legendary-and legendarily cursed-diamond that Daniel rescued from the natural history museum where he worked before the Germans sacked Paris? These questions should be enough to give the show some suspense. Louis Hofmann in All the Light We Cannot See Katalin Vermes-Netflix Soon, one of the show’s many interchangeably sadistic Nazi officers orders him to track down Marie. The human brain exists within the utter darkness of the human skull but, he explains, has the capacity to illuminate the entire world: “Even in complete darkness there is still light inside your mind.” The professor’s humanism has sustained Werner, who grew up in an orphanage before his prodigious skill with radios earned him a place at an exclusive and brutal Nazi military school, through an “old man’s war” that he despises. These lonely teenagers have something in common: they both used to stay up late listening to a mysterious professor deliver florid monologues to children about science and philosophy on the frequency Marie is now using. But she’s also doing courageous, illegal work for the Resistance, using the classic novel to send coded messages to Allied forces.Įlsewhere in Saint-Malo, at the crumbling hotel where his ever-shrinking regiment is billeted, Werner Pfennig ( Dark star Louis Hofmann) listens to Marie’s broadcasts while the bombs fall. She hopes to reach her father Daniel ( Mark Ruffalo) and uncle Etienne ( Hugh Laurie), from whom she’s been separated. Holed up alone in the walled city of Saint-Malo, where the Nazis maintained a stronghold for months after D-Day, Marie reads excerpts from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea over shortwave radio. Like Marie, Loberti is sightless, but that shared experience only lays the groundwork for a magnificently present performance that draws out the intelligence and tenacity of a character who might otherwise have been reduced to a pitiable damsel in distress. Aria Mia Loberti and Mark Ruffalo in All the Light We Cannot See Timea Saghy-NetflixĪt least All the Light’s creators made one inspired decision, in casting Aria Mia Loberti, a newcomer with no formal training in acting, as heroine Marie-Laure LeBlanc. Knight’s script is particularly flimsy, shallowly skimming each character’s surface and failing to meaningfully address the big moral questions that come with depicting a Nazi combatant as a good person. Not that these red flags alone can account for how many disastrous choices went into the making of this maudlin show. Another is that, unlike so many powerful authors who’ve helped shepherd their novels to the screen, Doerr is not among the series’ producers. One clue that screenwriter Steven Knight ( Peaky Blinders, See) and director Shawn Levy ( Stranger Things, Free Guy) have done wrong by Doerr’s story, of a blind French girl and a brilliant orphan turned reluctant German soldier in bombed-out Brittany during the final months of World War II, is that they’ve whittled down the 544-page doorstop to a skeletal four episodes. 2, isn’t just inferior to the book it’s a schmaltzy, incompetent, borderline offensive mess whose mere existence tarnishes the book’s legacy. That series, which arrives on the streamer on Nov. All the Light became a cultural phenomenon, selling more than 15 million copies worldwide by the time Netflix greenlighted a TV adaptation in 2021. The New York Times called the novel “ hauntingly beautiful” and named it one of the 10 best books of 2014. Barack Obama made time to devour-and recommend-it while he was still in the White House. It won a Pulitzer Prize and was shortlisted for a National Book Award. Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See might be the most widely acclaimed book of the past decade.
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