The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep on Netflix.
Fucking love Doug Cockle voicing Geralt here. The live action actor of Jaskier is great as well.
But wow this fucking sucked. As an animation, you can tell there is some talent behind the scenes. But that talent is worthless when the art style is so bland and the CGI so egregious.
The story is supposed to be a Witcher take on the Little Mermaid, but feels like it was written by AI. Seriously. A human prince and a mermaid princess are in love, but it's revealed that THEY DON'T EVEN KNOW EACH OTHER'S LANGUAGE. The books or the games would ridicule them mercilessly for this, but not a single comment is made.
Easy pass. Netflix can't stop running this franchise into the ground.
Man, never have my hopes been raised so high and then so brutally dashed with so few sentences. What a shame.
Excalibur (1981), 7/10
This is John Boorman's (of
Deliverance and
Zardoz fame) adaptation of the myth of King Arthur. It's a 2+ hour long, operatic, mythological and violent epic that apparently tells the story the most faithfully out of any King Arthur movies, so you know the plot. It's perhaps best known for its purposely over the top visual style, which can be best described as "fairytale on steroids": suits of armor glean impossibly brightly, the colors are ridiculously bold, and the location design resembles straight up science fiction a lot of the time. If you've seen one of those umpteen million "X as an 80s dark fantasy movie" AI videos, this is pretty much what they're trying to replicate visually. It's also massively influential to Zack the Hack Snyder, which is why I was curious about it.
I quite enjoyed it. It's got some serious issues, but the visuals is what the movie's really all about, and on that front it delivers by the bucketload. It might be one of the most gorgeous movies I've ever seen. There are so many shots that are basically paintings in motion, the stylized visuals are incredibly distinct and colourful, and sans Merlin's ridiculously distracting - and just plain ridiculous - metal hat, the weird amalgamation of medieval accuracy, high fantasy and trippy sci-fi influences somehow form a coherent, beautiful whole. Boorman was originally intent on directing an adaptation of Lord of the Rings, and that would have at least looked incredible based on this.
The storytelling is deliberately mythological and operatic, meaning that the movie's more about a vibe than a plot. That's a nice way of saying that this movie's structure is kind of all over the place. Past the initial steps of Arthur getting Excalibur and becoming king the movie just kind of goes through several plots without them really affecting one another that much. There isn't really a core focus or throughline, which can make the movie feel rather meandering. The characters are nothing to write home about either: there's not a lot of character growth or arcs to be found, the characters are more like archetypes or ideas rather than three-dimensional people. But on the other hand once you settle in for this being more of a mood piece, that kind of falls to the wayside and you can just enjoy the pretty pictures. This movie is also surprisingly stacked with its cast: Liam Neeson, Helen Mirren, Patrick Stewart, Ciaran Hinds and Gabriel Byrne all understand what kind of movie they're in, and commit to the over the top grandiosity properly. The odd man out here is the actor of Merlin, whose performance slips into Tim the Enchanter territory far too often, and when it happens the out of place humor is
incredibly jarring.
As a final note, the fact that Snyder loves this movie further solidifies my opinion that he's a moron who's managed to fail upwards. He loves this movie because "it's not a movie for kids", ie. he likes the blood and tits. Apparently missing every actually interesting thing about it: the visual stylization, the way the actors sell this incredibly overcooked stuff, and the mythological grandiosity. Making this kind of thing work is no easy task, which is probably why this kind of stuff hasn't been made in ages.
