Quiet the controversy surrounds this badly written and executed piece which shows director/producer and co writer Preston reaching well beyond her abilities to make essentially a soap opera of tired, misdirected story lines in place of something that should have been an insightful and eye opening look into the still raw wounds of the Christchurch NZ earthquake. So instead of stories of loss and struggle we get the cartoon villains 'white power skinheads', and a near insulting time consuming story about a dog, we get a teenage girl and her journey to the doctors to get her std thrush rash checked, we get a yuppie stock broker and his plight to recover the files that incriminate his shifty dealings, a contract laborer and his wife that doesn't get his drive to earn enough to pay the bills, and a heartless property developer all hamfistedly rendered in children's crayon, taking up the lion share of the 3 x 90 minute episodes; all stories and characters no one can care about, shoehorned into the pretense that this is in anyway really about the Christchurch Earthquake situation and the people that have endured it.
Thankfully it doesn't completely ignore where it is set and we do get one believable character in Rachel House's 'Joycie Waru', a character finally that reflects the nature of the city and what happened to it, although Joycie Waru was always who she was. In reality the Earthquake brought people and communities together, it changed people to do selfless things. Joycie doesn't really change. She just is the person through out. There is no real CHCH Earthquake ark to her character although she does suffer the slings and arrows from the event.
Aside from the predominantly cheesy story lines and even cheesier acting (merivale pearls, dumb skinhead hanger-on, the aforementioned cartoon villains) the main criticism of this film is the travesty it has occurred in. It sets itself in the still raw and active wounds of a natural disaster that destroyed a city and its community, receiving large govt funding to finance its production yet it hardly touches the story beneath the event beyond ticking that 2 major earthquakes and a handful of aftershocks happened and there was damage. No word of Earthquake Commission (EQC) Battles, the much loathed EQ commissioner and the controversies surrounding him, the battle for profit in the city and the soul destroying fights for fairness that are still raging over three years after the events, and the Government's promise to see the people of CHCH right, and then it's continual failure to do so, as well documented by 3 news Campbell live who have championed the cause for the city.
Aside from the 2 major quakes and a couple of dramatically timed aftershocks, the continual pounding the residents of the city got from the over 12,000 quakes, how it ground them down and shattered their nerves and made them all experts on geotechnics, is not conveyed.
The hundreds of soul destroying stories of people who got kicked out of their central city homes and places of work and forcibly stopped from salvaging anything of their lives while govt workers plan and execute the demolition of their properties, all without consultation with the people it affects, are hardly touched on.
The people who died, including a large number of overseas language students and the serious miss-steps that were made that contributed to the tragedy. There were thousands of more affecting real stories Hope and Wire could have told that could have had real relevance to the culture and communities in New Zealand. Why on earth Preston decided to inflict her hammy soap operas on the NZ public instead only she can know. Obviously she and her partner weren't up to the task as writers.
That this series was made with $5.1 million of Government money and most likely consumed the lions share of resources the real CHCH Earthquake story is going to get, to tell a bunch of sorry cliché tales that no one really needed to see is the real shame in this project. Preston has deprived the country of the insight they deserve with her single minded soap, and its not even entertaining, it's just a kind of badly done dull.
