dicknerd

I invested nearly four hours into watching this movie, largely based on an IMDb rating of 8.4 and having skimmed user reviews and seeing headlines that used descriptors of "best ever", "epic", "masterpiece", "wonderful", "profound", "superb", and "beautiful". Now usually I find that my taste in movies aligns to the IMDb reviews, so away I went. Mistake. After around 2 hours I was still quite invested and enjoying it, but then....not so much....at all. The pace is slow, the musical score by Ennio Morricone is indeed classical but at times seems set a mood that is incongruent with the plot and characters, especially towards the end when Noodles and Deborah are looking at each other over soft romantic music, considering the atrocious way that he assaulted her. So by that point the score was just annoying me.

By the end I was wondering what robust conversations must have been had when it was edited multiple times to run between 6 and 2 hours before deciding on just under 4 hours. At least I didn't have to sit through the 6 hour version. I mean if you're studying film and want to write a dissertation on the movie and the acting ability of DeNiro and Woods, there's lots of material there to work with, but if you just want to enjoy the plot and engage with the characters, then not so much. After 3 hours and 49 minutes I thought that was a waste of time.

I thought this show started off really well, and finished terribly. The concept was really interesting; time travel, crime, and a backdrop off a nuclear fallout. However as each season went on it became more complicated. By the end you have like 50+ characters spread across multiple generations within in four interlinked family trees with some characters aging and some not, and then parallel worlds with the same but slightly different characters. I actually was invested enough half way through season two to try and draw up a family tree and work out who's related to who, who's sleeping with who, who has gone back in time and who hasn't. Introduce parallel universes and I gave up with the family trees.

Also I found myself repeatedly moving between German original and then to English, but the English dub was so stilted and inauthentic that it annoyed me too much, so I moved back to the original German. However that does add an extra degree of concentration required.

As per another reviewer, if I had to rate each season it would be

• S1 - 9
• S2 - 8
• S3 - 4

By the end of season 3 I was like "WTF is going on". I'm sure if I re-watched it I would get more out of it, but pretty sure I can't be bothered to do that. Pity as it started really strongly. Bravo to those who stuck with it long enough to watch it all multiple times and consider it a 10/10 "masterpiece"; that was not my experience however.