Amazon Prime Video’s new TV series, “The Wheel of Time,” founded on Robert Jordan’s series of novels, is based on a rich and deep story. Or, this viewer, who was unfamiliar with Jordan’s work, had to come to terms when the exhibition began with Rosamund Pike explaining the backstory and bets of a hurried voiceover.
There is nothing with locution in principle: it can be used well or badly, but there is the feeling, from the first moments of this program, that overflows with history, so much so that it cannot tell everything subtly, nor using the discussion and characterization team. The result is an exhibition that might well appeal to the center of Jordan’s fandom from the start, but makes it a frustrating watch for audiences who don’t care if “The Wheel of Time” beats “Thrones Game” for the screen that if the screen they look at again is coherent and well designed on its own terms.
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It’s hard to untangle “Time” from its ambitions throughout “Thrones”: the superficial similarity and perception that Amazon is hungry for its own global ruin have been widely noticed in the run-up to the launch of this new show. opposing both is hardly forced. The origins of the two programs, drawn from fantasy novel sequences, are similar. The same goes for the problems and the language used to describe them: in “The Wheel of Time,” we are told several times that a conflagration with “the Dark One” is coming, and that a selected one —”the Drapassn”—will have to pass to meet him.
Moraine (Pike) is on the hunt for this Dragon. As a member of a tough circle of magical women, she discovers five other young men with wonderful potential, believing that one of them is the figure of the reincarnated Messiah who could save the world. (These five are, for example, played by actors, whom we wish they would spread at a slower pace. )Moraine’s religion is profound and will have to be: we are informed that there is a high probability that those she tests who are not the dragon may die in the attempt.
This premise would seem, at first glance, to lend itself well to episodic drama. And yet, the series, created through Rafe Judkins, digs itself up trapped in various swamps. Part of the challenge with “Wheel” is its dependence on the show: we seem to be constantly heading toward or descending from a violent conflagration, so much so that the strength of the series to amaze us is waning. If this is an attempt to fit into what “Thrones” has become popular memory, Judkins and his team Beg to remember that much of the first season of this drama was a high-risk character drama, not a war with a new opening of each episode. danger that awaits you directly.
This affects his ability to take the character out. We see more of the five’s abilities than their interactions or organizational dynamics in a rather uncommon mission, although the actors that include them do their best. And Pike can seamlessly invoke imperiousness, as enthusiasts of his films from “Gone Girl” to “I Care a Lot” I know. But it’s only in the sixth episode that we see her doing much more than making a serious song, during which many would possibly have lost interest. And the other young people she leads rarely go beyond their roles. in history like gears of a wheel, which is vital to how history comes together, but not in themselves.
About this wheel: The fictional world of this series is governed through a faith that fiercely believes in reincarnation and anything that goes as far as predestination (it is invoked in a series of opening credits that literalizes vanity as in “Game of Thrones”): There, the action of the series was summarized through a game board, here through a rotating loom. ) This is what drives the Dragon hunt, as well as confidence in a wonderful war that is coming. A tough magical woman (Sophie Okonedo) lectures two of Moraine’s charges: “The wheel doesn’t care if you’re young or scared, petty or weak. In fact, he doesn’t care what you want. The wheel calls you there, whether you want it or not. The last war is coming. ” What each of us needs now makes no sense. The only thing it deals with is what you do.
It is valuable to quote in a block to give a concept of the taste, or lack of flavor, of the writing here, and its tendency to come in large forceful pieces. It also provides a concept of how the ideals of the characters clash with other facets of the series that appear in conditions to be broadcast on television. The duty of these characters, from the beginning, in the face of a confrontation greater than them, tends to erase who they are; if they are told in the middle of the first season that what they need does not matter and will have to be sublimated to the cause, where can they go in the coming seasons?
There are perspectives here: the sixth episode, of the six provided to critics, is the most powerful of the first broadcast of the series, even though it comprises Okonedo’s likely restrictive monologue. you can do beyond the hunt of the week; he shows us new aspects of Moraine and develops his appointments with his fees far beyond what he was. If it’s going to last as long as “Game of Thrones,” “The Wheel of Time” will have to settle on itself and end up doing this kind of work, the kind that had been overlooked through a dazzling audience in a hurry for exposure and cataclysm. He has already shown that he can make greatness. What he has to do now is show us those who live in it.
“The Wheel of Time” will release its first 3 episodes on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, November 19.
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