Jeremy-608

Please scroll down to the bottom for an update. Sorry this is a tad TLDR.

I've only just finished E3, so this review is a bit early, but I figured out how to watch it which worked for me, so it might help others. But first a couple of comments.

I think the opening sequence is rather silly and much too long ..... talk about labouring the point.

The makers then spent the next 50 minutes confusing the heck out of me, like they were taking pleasure from it. Annoying.

Next, I think some of the -ve comments about Nicole Kidman are harsh. That haunted, blank, fixed-expression, thousand-yard-stare which many are putting down to work being done are I think what you'd expect from someone in her situation. It might take many years, if ever, for someone who's experienced such tragedy to have her smile once again 'reach her eyes'. I think NK gets it pretty much spot-on.

And finally ... what I did to watch it and enjoy it.

I'd finished E1 and it went straight to E2 as usual. At this moment, it was borderline ... will I stop or persevere? And this is what happened.

At the very start of E2, on the boat, I thought "OK, it's making some sense now."

So I stopped watching right there, about 30 sec into E2, and went back and started over from the beginning of E1 (I FF'd through the annoying history of tragedies opening sequence).

And this time, with the benefit of having been confused through E1 once and picking up a couple of things, I really enjoyed it because I picked up everything else.

I could relax and not have to try too hard. It all made sense, and I enjoyed it. And I still am.

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Welcome to the bottom! OK, I wrote the above after I'd watched 3 eps. At that time I rated the series 8/10.

I've now finished and I have just changed my rating from 8 to 10/10. It just got better and better.

The episode, #5 I think, which was an hour and 40 mins long and was all from the PoV of the service workers, the (predominantly) Filipino women conversing in Tagalog, was a master-stroke of film making. The best 100 minutes of television I've seen in a long time.

Watching S10. I have never, ever, seen an actress play a character who's pregnant as well as Amber Marshall plays Amy. Every nuance, facial expression, awkward movement .... it's perfection. And the best part of her acting is that *nothing* is overdone. The character Amy would naturally play-down this state she's in, but Amber takes it to a whole new level in her portrayal. So good, that I had to look up 'was Amber Marshall actually pregnant?' And then, after a few more episodes into S10, around rock slide / Tim coming off Spartan time, E10 I think, I looked it up again just to make sure! Wonderful acting.

It's hard to rate because it spans both extreme ends of the spectrum with not much in the middle. Maybe Henry Wadsworth Longfellow can help .... "There was a little girl, Who had a little curl, Right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, She was very good indeed, But when she was bad she was horrid." This series is good, very good indeed, when the screen is filled with the lake, boats, mountains, rolling countryside, pretty much anything green or blue, and the only sound is scary or boring music. It's so bad that it's horrid whenever there's a person on the screen acting (and I use the word loosely) and trying to deliver - with a straight face - the script of a screenpaly that is so cringeworthty, I think the makers had the comedy genre in mind.