Bruce Lee failed to develop this project primarily because of race, at a time when David Carradine was made to look oriental. Currently, "Warrior" does not seem to make a major difference either, with Chinese characters barely speaking Chinese with each other, but rather anachronistic English. The series had elements to be a great martial arts show, but it soon forgets its origin and ends up being a narrative disaster with little fortune when it comes to transferring the time.
Jonathan Tropper has seen many (Italian) mafia movies and possibly many martial arts movies, but he builds a scattered and messy mix that draws from so many sources that it ends up being excessive in his representation of the time. There is a nonsense in these productions that want to represent a historical era but introducing modern elements.
Personally, I don't find much interest in fight scenes, which are bland and poorly directed. And again we find a lack of rigor in the choreographies, which want to be modern when they could have been inspired by the different fighting cultures that are represented in the story. And you can't help but think about what directors like Gareth Evans could have done with material like this.
"Rådebank" has been throughout the first two seasons a perfect portrait of the problems of young people in their twenties, those who have already dropped out of school and begin a difficult search for financial and sentimental stability in their maturity. With a first season more focused on heartbreak and loss of love, the second managed to take a stratospheric leap by addressing the drama of economic instability, and managed to catch a spectacular audience. The series ends at its best moment of social repercussion, achieving incredible figures of half a million viewers in the first two episodes of a third season that is also the last, and making the series one of the most successful in the history of NRK. But creator Lynn-Jeanette Kyed ends up building a sentimental drama that falls into the worst flaws of cheesy teen love stories. The objective, it is clear, is to offer a season of stability for the protagonists, after the first two that shook their lives.
Glenn Tore (Odin Waage) is once again the main character, but the story focuses more on Hege Husby (Maja Christiansen), a character who had not shone too much in previous seasons and who in the second seemed anchored in the first stage of mourning: the negation. Now she assumes control through her romantic relationship and the beginning of her professional projection. The vicissitudes of the "rånere" culture that has developed in some small towns in Norway, which consists of a community focused mainly on using long hours of driving in their tuned cars as a hobby, are now in the background, reduced to a somewhat simple subplot about competition between two groups of "råneres" that doesn't really lead anywhere. The central story is the one starring Glenn and Hege, and although it is easy to predict what the end of the season will be, the writer leaves some stones in the way, such as the difficult coexistence of the professional development of the protagonist with her personal relationship, but only to stretch and capsize a more topical love story than a series like this deserved. The capacity for unpredictability and surprise that it gained from previous seasons is lost in backlit sex scenes and cheesy whimpers. There is still an empathy with the characters that has been achieved throughout the previous episodes, but the conclusion ends up being conservative and somewhat sexist. Something like that it is worth giving up a promising future to achieve emotional stability, as if both things could not be complementary. "Rådebank" has an accommodating ending that doesn't live up to the great series it had been to date.
[Apple TV+] S1 was possibly somewhat underestimated, but it built a space between horror and absurd humor, which is even revealed as a premonitory of the subsequent confinement, given its narrative premise of taking place only in the house where the protagonists live. Although chaotic in its development, the typical ending of Shyamalan productions revealed great surprises.
In S2 it seems clearer that they are trying to build a more extensive narrative arc (M. Night Shyamalan has commented that from this season they started to work in a plot that lasts 40 episodes, that is, four seasons). And in a way it's about putting some order into the chaos of S1, especially around the character of Leanne. They certainly do, but without finishing building a homogeneous development.
One of the most interesting characteristics of this series is the selection of directors, mainly from European fantasy and horror films: the French Julia Ducournau does a splendid job in her two episodes, marking a beginning of great visual impact. But there are also the Swiss Lisa Brühlmann, the Swedish Isabella Eklöf or the Hungarian Nimród Antal, apart from two episodes that are reserved by M. Night Shyamalan and his daughter, Ishana Shyamalan.
S2 has an excellent start and a haunting ending, but in the middle of the season it gets repetitive and seems to want to play more clearly on the absurd humor, which is disconcerting at times. The revelation of Leanne as a kind of fallen angel who is able to bring back to life (to Jonathan, but also to Julian), but who behaves like a rebellious angel, opens up the possibilities for a plot that seems to be turning her ever-growing into the real protagonist (in the second season the characters of Julian and Sean are a bit blurred). And the end of the season, with the entrance of Josephine, promises more than they possibly end up offering us later.
Long season that possibly is one of the worst in the series. It is surprising that the first episode premiered in October 2019, and a year and a half later it has concluded. It's clear that TWD is AMC's flagship series, and the channel needs to continue to attract a loyal audience, even though the narration has actually been losing steam. The announcement of the final season is also a way to keep viewers aware of the story.
As in the series itself in general, the season should have ended much earlier. And possibly the Covid caused a new season to be replaced by the filming of several "extra" episodes. The showrunners have taken the opportunity to rehearse with the characters of Carol and Daryl in some of them. And the conclusion is clear: they are the most boring characters in the series, despite the announced spin-off.
It is significant that Negan is the protagonist of the last episode, surely the best of all, the one that contains interesting information, a suitable pace and, finally, walking deads. And everything seems to indicate that he will be one of the main protagonists of the last season, especially in his confrontation with Maggie.
The mourning for the death of a loved one has five phases, according to the theory developed by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969: Denial stage, anger stage, negotiation stage, depression stage and acceptance stage. Basically, "WandaVision" is a representation of Wanda Maximoff's mourning for Vision's death, the phases of which are present throughout the nine episodes of this first MCU proposal as a long-story development. This grieving process, which leads the protagonist to build an idyllic life, transformed into a transposition of family series from the 1950s to the 1980s, is the most interesting of a concept that began with certain doses of risk, although it was not what fans of the Marvel universe expected.
But the first three episodes of "WandaVision" are the best we have seen so far in the beginning of 2021, a splendid tribute to the evolution of television comedies, and by extension, to how not only our environment has been transformed throughout the last decades, but mainly the way of producing audiovisual content for the whole family. At the same time, the introduction of disruptive elements of this "idyllic" reality (it depends on who) has been creating a disturbing vision of that representation of reality that is fictitious (something like a version of the false envelope that was shown to us in "The Truman Show" (Peter Weir, 1998), when the supposed reality manifested itself as a nightmare). It's certainly a brave approach, not least because Marvel fans aren't exactly demanding visual experiments or especially risky ones. But for those of us who don't have much interest in this MCU that appears to us as a puzzle made up of pieces that unfold between series and movies, it is an interesting approaching.
"WandaVision" has been adopting the Marvel aesthetic, putting its story on track to follow the highway to the rest of the MCU (something like what happened with "The Mandalorian" (Disney +, 2019-) in the second season, after a first one that went out of the lane and was therefore more attractive). Because the problem of producing series that are part of a set, that depend on the above but above all must link with other projects (in this case mainly with "Doctor Strange 2: The multiverse of madness" (Sam Raimi, 2022)), is that many ends cannot be tied, they must be left open to be coupled without loopholes (actually, it doesn't matter that much either, because every time it has to solve narrative inconsistencies in its characters, Marvel pulls a multiverse up its sleeve). In this way, "Wandavision" ends up being so subordinate to what will come that it stays halfway, in a kind of independent story in which, yes, it is concluded in the Acceptance stage of the mourning, but the character of Scarlet Witch practically does not evolve. This dependency is such that, of the 50 minutes that "The series finale" lasts, 10 minutes are of credits with introduction of post-credits scenes that announce what will come in the near future.
