That was great. Good changes from the book, too.
(Watches first episode.) Yup!
As a fan of the book, I felt like they rushed the character setup in order to get to the manor by the end of the first episode. Plus the monster part was just not very horrifying (in addition to being way more specific than what was in the book.) The race to the county line was way more tense.
It’s like someone, when pitching the show, said, “… and the point is, the real monster is racism.” To which a high-ranking executive replied, “But there are gonna be lots of CGI monsters, right? Right?”
Unnecessarily visualized CGI monsters aside, the cast is great and the flavor of the book is definitely there, so looking forward to the rest of it.
A lot of the scenes in that montage were recreations of Gordon Parks photos.
I gotta say, I found that montage, while nicely shot, very distracting.
Hearing James Baldwin in 1965 talk about the French and Algeria while watching a recreation of a famous photo from the Great Depression took us away from our characters and their problems in 1954, while the point the montage was making was dramatized elsewhere multiple times in the same episode with our characters, starting with the bus scene. Show don’t tell and all that.
(I found the opening CGI fest even more distracting, mind you. They’re obviously going for spectacle, while I prefer a slow grounded burn like Get Out.)
I thought the dream sequence opener was great! I loved the mix of his book monsters and actual war.
I thought the first episode was pretty great. This review of the first episode is good too.
Main protagonists having dreams of mythos creatures is very Lovecraftian, so I actually like this quite a bit. The rest was obviously just dream weirdness of course.
I’m not ready to dismiss it all as dream weirdness. Jackie Robinson smacking Cthulhu seems way odd, but he was a larger-than-life hero to African Americans at the time, so him cracking a Great Old One’s skull makes sense.
Also, I believe the woman that portrayed the dream Princess of Mars play someone else in the previews.
I think she might play Christina Braithwhite? Also, if you like Jonathan Majors, he was in Last Black Man in San Francisco which is great (no Qt3 thread yet, I don’t think).
Loved the first episode! Going to try to queue them up a bit.
I don’t think so. She’s Asian. I believe it’s Jamie Chung. In IMDB she’s listed as being in this episode.
That was reference to the Evil Dead Cabin right?
I guess you can read it that way, though it didn’t occur to me at the time.
This is really beautifully shot, and the acting is uniformly excellent. No real story so far, but I’m willing to give it some time.
Watched the first episode last night. Spent an hour thinking "OK, this is good, and I really like these characters, but I’m a little disappointed because I was hoping there would be a little more “magic and monsters” and instead it looks like it’s more “racism is the real monster”. While that’s cool and all, the show is called Lovecraft Country after all.
Then the last 10 minutes hit and I was like “Holy shit! THIS is what I came for!”
The combination made for a fantastic mix of dark reality and dark fantasy. Can’t wait to see where this goes from here.
EDIT : I did wonder though, does rural Massachusetts really look that much like rural Indiana? It just seemed awful flat and Mid-Westerny to be somewhere in the Northeast.
The rural parts are, of course, not shot in Mass, but rather in Georgia. Because everything is shot in Georgia these days.
(Though as a former Chicagian, I was pleased to see some actual Chicago.)
As someone that lives in that area of Lovecraft Country, it looked all wrong.
Just to continue this slightly off-topic thread of places to film that can pass off as “anywhere, USA”, remember when X-files was filmed in Vancouver (along with many other shows)? I always thought that look really passed the test well for being anywhere in America. They’d be investigating some house in Sioux City, Iowa, and I could easily believe that it was just an overcast day in Sioux City, it was pretty believable I thought. Shows filmed in or near L.A. didn’t nearly have that same universal “this could be any city” look, because it was too sun-drenched. When the X-files switched to L.A. it was a very noticeable shift. I feel like now that everything is filmed in Georgia, it’s closer to L.A. than it is to Vancouver. It has a certain look, it’s not as universal looking.
Frustratingly, Vancouver doesn’t really look anything like where I live. I don’t think I could afford the rent.
For as much as the first episode ramped up the weirdness in its final act, this second episode still felt bananas, like I’d just stumbled into the middle of a season of very different television. The Braithwhite family felt like villains from some supernatural show on the CW that just stumbled onto the wrong set.
I guess I still like it, but that’s a pretty aggressive swerve from the first episode.
I have no idea what happens next. I was expecting the events of that episode to be covered over several episodes to the season.
This show is moving at a fantastic clip
The, ah, snake scene made me better understand the review that said at times the show feels a whole lot more like True Blood than Watchmen.
(And yes, the casting for the minor roles feels very CW. Would it have killed them to hire someone who can do an actual New England accent for the crusty kennel keeper? The bear monologue would have played better with one. They have HBO money after all. Maybe they spent it all on the snake CGI.)
Vancouver can absolutely pass for Anywhere USA … so long as it’s part of the USA that is a rich, verdant green with lots of foothills.
I remember some episode of the X-files that was supposed to take place in Minnesota on Halloween … and it was a rich verdant green, with lots of foothills, and crickets chirping on the sound track. Which is not at all how Minnesota looks/sounds on Halloween (green in June yes, crickets in August or even late September yes, but the weather has taken care of the green and the crickets by the end of October. And of course foothills never.)
Even better was a Legends of Tomorrow episode where they were in the Old West meeting Jonah Hex in a tiny little made-up “Arizona” town in a landscape that was, you guessed it, a rich verdant green with lush trees and waist-high grass. Why whoever put the episode together didn’t just cross out “Arizona” in the script and write in “Oregon Territory” to make the story match the Vancouver location, I have no idea.
I was grateful to the people who did HBO’s The Outsider for yielding to reality and relocating Stephen King’s smalltown Maine to smalltown Georgia to match the filming location. It worked perfectly fine and removed a needless distraction.