Reading/Watching Log #111

You know, I really did try to get this one done on time. Whenever I finished watching or reading something, I immediately wrote down my thoughts on it, and yet I still ended up posting this a week late. My time is so limited at the moment, I don’t think I’m going to be able to go into as much detail with these entries in the future – it’s just too much of a time commitment.

But why didn’t anyone ever tell me that rereading your favourite books puts you in a great mood? For my birthday season I’ve been rediscovering the works of Meredith Ann Pierce, Patricia McKillip, Garth Nix, Philip Reeve and Frances Hardinge and I feel SO GOOD. If you’re in a bad mental place right now (and let’s face it, most of us are), I’d definitely advise you to a. stop watching the news, and b. track down the work of a favourite author.

Due to a couple of GIF-sets passing through my dashboard recently, I ended up watching several films starring or featuring (or cameoing) Holliday Grainger – which meant quite a few period films. Likewise, I finally tracked down those two Musketeers films that both came out in 2023, and finished up the third and final season of the BBC’s Robin Hood with my long-suffering friend. 

It’s been a couple of years since we started that particular project, but I’m going to hold off talking about it in this post since I’m working on a retrospective which will probably be completed within the next decade or so.

Kristy for President by Anne M. Martin

I’m beginning to realize there’s a difference between the Babysitters Club books I enjoyed as a child, and the ones I’m reading as an adult for the first time. The former provide wonderful jaunts down memory lane, filled with fun idiosyncrasies and fond memories. The latter are formulaic and rather dull.

Unsurprising really, especially since Kristy for President feels like a repeat of Mallory on Strike. You’d think we’d get a lot of her campaigning strategies, the issues she’s running on, the competition with other students – and there is some of this, but it’s mostly just Kristy taking on too many responsibilities and feeling the strain of stretching herself too thin. She has to pass on babysitting jobs, cancel a Krushers practice session, fails a science test and so on.

The B-plot is Jamie Newton getting a new bike and being unable to ride it due to a lack of practice. He’s afraid of falling off, demands that the babysitters clear the path of any obstacles (including leaves and twigs) and wants one of them to hold the bike upright at all times. I really don’t think it’s up to the babysitters to deal with this, especially when he has the training wheels taken off prematurely. Seriously, his parents didn’t have anything to say about that?

At least it’s connected, however tenuously, with the A-plot – haven’t had that for a while! In this case, Kristy realizes that she and Jamie both have the same problem: trying to do too much at once. Well, kind of. Technically Jamie’s problem was that he was pushing himself too fast and wanting to be perfect at something instantly, which isn’t really the same thing as trying to take on too many things at once, as Kristy was doing.

Ultimately, Kristy announces during the candidate debate that she’ll no longer be in the running, since she simply has too much else on her plate, while some anonymous neighbourhood kids convince Jamie that he needs to stick with his training wheels for a while longer. Lessons learned all round.

Other highlights: Alan Gray’s presidential election speech is him asking the auditorium to stand up, and then sit down again. They do as he says, and he cites this as proof he’s a good leader, as everyone obeyed him. Mercifully, he doesn’t win the election (though these days, he probably would). Grace Blume is one of the other candidates, who treats the whole thing like a popularity contest, and eventually the position is won by Pete Black, that generic supporting character we don’t know anything about, but who occasionally dates Stacey and/or Claudia.

Mallory ends up winning the sixth grade class secretary position, and I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that we’ll never hear about this again.

Another thing that annoyed me: Kristy campaigns partly on the belief that the student body should have a say on what the annual school production is about – as this year it’s Mary Poppins, which everyone agrees is babyish.

Er, Mary Poppins? Stacey’s long-time established favourite movie? She took Kristy’s younger cousins to see it in Kristy’s Big Day? She always wants to watch it during their sleepovers? She’s present when the other girls diss it, and yet for some reason has nothing to say in its defence. (To be honest, the mention of Mary Poppins is so specific that I wonder if the ghost writer was making a stealth dig at Stacey, who really isn’t in this book all that much).

Also, the exposition chapter is chapter three, not chapter two. I’m scared!

Mallory and the Dream Horse by Anne M. Martin

The Babysitters Club becomes The Saddle Club for this singular volume, and it certainly manages to hit most of the horse story tropes: a girl who can’t ride but is filled with enthusiasm for horses, a nasty fall that leaves her afraid to get back in the saddle, and a wealthy alpha bitch who lords about the stables. I honestly don’t think there’s a horse book in existence that doesn’t include that particular character type (the only variation I can think of is in the Thoroughbred series, where it was a boy instead of a girl). The stories usually end with everyone competing in a gymkhana, a word I’ve never learned how to pronounce.

Mallory is the natural choice for a story about horses, even though she was the protagonist of Mallory and the Ghost Cat only two books ago. She discovers a brochure advertising riding lessons at a local stable, and so prepares one of her careful pitches to the Pike parents. She’s done this in previous books, and it’s rather cute: she plies them with compliments, makes sure she’s being particularly helpful, has a plan for how they’re going to handle expenses (in this case, the stables are nearby, so she’s able to bike there herself), and sometimes even asks for too much so that she can then barter it down to a more reasonable package (which is what she really wanted the whole time).

In comparison, Jessi just comes straight out and asks… but her parents say no.

This leads to Mallory and Jessi’s first fight (noooooo!) when Mal can’t stop talking about how excited she is to finally learn how to ride a horse. Unfortunately, the lessons don’t go quite as planned – she doesn’t fit in with the other kids, she ends up falling off a flighty horse, and is then wracked with nerves over how she’s going to perform in a compulsory riding competition, that naturally everyone turns out to watch.

They handle the results pretty realistically: Mallory ends up coming sixth out of twelve, which means she was better than she thought she was, but credibly not top of the class. Her parents offer to pay for another round of lessons, but Mal decides to call it quits. The reason is obviously because these books have to be pretty standalone, and the author can’t expect other ghostwriters to weave Mal’s horse riding lessons into their own stories, but they unfortunately go with Mallory’s nervousness about her fall as a reason not to continue. Everyone rider and instructor knows that if you fall out of the saddle you MUST get back on, and so we’re left with the moral that if something scares you – just quit!

The child-related B-plot involves the rest of the Pike siblings deciding to put on a talent show for themselves and the rest of the neighbourhood kids, which leads to many hijinks but (surprisingly) no moral lessons learned. The chapters about the talent show just involve them all having fun, which I suppose was rather refreshing, even if it felt a bit pointless.

There’s also a C-plot about Nina Marshall having trouble letting go of her security blanket now that she’s attending school, which is weird in two respects: firstly that this has apparently been going on for some time now, even though the babysitters have never noticed Nina having a security blanket before, and secondly because it’s resolved when the blanket is destroyed in the dryer and Dawn comes up with the idea to put all the pieces in Nina’s pockets, in her shoes, up her sleeves and so on. This way she can carry her blanket around with her without the other kids teasing her about it.

Nothing wrong with that, but even though I’ve never read this book before, I’m SURE I’ve read this storyline. At some point later in the series, I guarantee that this exact same scenario will play out with a completely different child, right down to the blanket getting destroyed in the dryer. Stay tuned...

Gossip from the Forest by Sara Maitland

Lately I’ve been trying to read a bit more non-fiction (even if the subject is fiction) and this series of essays made for a fascinating read. Maitland spent a year visiting various forests around Britain, testing her hypothesis that forests are intrinsic to what we would call northern, or Teutonic, fairy tales. That is, this specific type of fairy tale could only have originated by people who lived in or around the forests.

Could Hansel and Gretal have taken place anywhere other than a forest? How about Little Red Riding Hood, or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? Or Sleeping Beauty behind her hedge of thorns, or Cinderella who originally received gifts not from a fairy godmother, but a tree growing in her backyard?

As Maitland says, it’s a guess, but: “it is a deep guess though, from how the stories fit into our forests and how our forests fit into the stories. It is a guess that works.”

And yes, she is aware that our most famous renditions of these tales come from the Brothers Grimm, who were obviously German, though her rebuttal is that since much of Britain’s population immigrated there from the Continent and that Europe has its fair share of forests, the stories collected by the Grimms are ultimately as much British as German.

Forgive a lengthy quote, but she describes it best herself:

The mysterious secrets and silences, gifts and perils of the forest are both the background to and the source of these tales. Modern scholarship has taken a number of approaches to this material, which presents an insubstantial and tricky body of work. [There are two approaches in particular]: Jungian psychoanalytical approach (resonating because they deal in archetypes, in universal experiences) or a global ethnographic approach which finds tropes from the tales in every culture everywhere. But they are different: fairy stories from the Arabian Nights have many of the same themes and narrative sequences, but they are not the same stories. The heroes do not go out and get lost in the forest, or escape into the forest, because there aren’t any. As such, they never get lost at all – they are seeking adventure, or exiled, or abducted.

Forests are places where a person can get lost and can also hide – losing and hiding, of things and people, are central to European fairy stories in ways that are not true of similar stories in different geographies. Landscape informs the collective imagination as much as or more than it forms the individual psyche and its imagination, but this dimension is not something to which we always pay enough attention. The monotheist Abrahamic faiths have their roots in the desert. You need a big god to fill the vast spaces, a god that will travel with you, not local gods of a place. Buddhism emerges from high places, where the everlasting silences of snow invites a kind of concentration, the loss of ego in the enormity of the mountains. The joyful, humanistic polytheism of the Mediterranean, where gods behave like humans (badly) and humans may become gods, and heroes (hybrids) link the two inextricably, and metamorphosis destabilises expectation – arise in a terrain where there was infinite variety, where you can move in a matter of hours from mountain to seashore, where islands are scattered casually, and where one place is very precisely not along another.

The great stretches of forest in northern Europe, their constant seasonal changes, their restricted views, their astonishing biological diversity, their secret gifts and perils and the knowledge that you have to go through them to get to anywhere else, created the themes and ethics of the fairy tales we know best. There are secrets, hidden identities, cunning disguises, there are rhythms of change like the changes of the seasons, there are characters, both human and animal, whose assistance can be earned or spurned, and there is over and over again, the journey or quest, which leads first to knowledge and then to happiness. The forest is the place of trial in fairy stories, both dangerous and exciting. Coming to terms with the forest, surviving its terrors, utilizing its gifts and gaining its help is the way to happy ever after.

Sure, it’s a bit of a tentative link, and there’s a good chance that Maitland mainly just wanted to write about forests and fairy tales, and so reversed-engineered this hypothesis in order to justify doing so. It’s also based on a very tenuous feeling that she gets when visiting forests and reading fairy tales:

Inside most of us post-enlightenment and would-be rational adults there is a child who is terrified by the wild wood... it was in a different piece of Caledonian forest, Glen Affric, that I first recognized that forests gave me the same sets of feelings and emotions that I get from fairy stories. One reason I wanted to come to Braemar was to try and understand this strange connection better.

But she still presents an interesting argument, and makes several solid points along the way. She’s correct when she states that most scholars of fairy tales search for the similarities in the stories, when in this case, she’s exploring the details of difference, specifically how they pertain to the geographies in which the stories are set.

I also liked the concept of stories and forests protecting each other. That is, forests provide the inspiration for a lot of stories, but forests also figure so much into so many old and beloved fairy tales that whenever real forests are threatened by development or deforestation, the public is moved by a near-primal urge to protect them. Just as there’s a symbiotic relationship between trees and mushrooms, together forming a complex reciprocal ecosystem, so too do stories give us appreciation for the forests and trees.

And at the end of the day, Maitland isn’t pretending to write a scholarly paper, just a series of essays on the history of Britain’s remaining forests and the fairy tales that she was reminded of when she visited them. Each chapter ends with a retelling of a famous story, whether it’s one of Hansel and Gretel in their middle age, Sleeping Beauty dreaming of the centuries passing by, or how the seven dwarfs perceived Snow White.

She inevitably got more out of the experience than we did, because of course we’re not there in the forests with her, and sometimes her conduct gets on my nerves: she constantly taking her dog off the leash, and once discusses how she enters a plantation in order to steal a Christmas tree. But she writes beautifully, and whether you agree with her or not, she does make a fascinating, if not compelling, argument:

I do not feel I have proved my thesis – that we have the stories we have because we are people whose roots are in the northern European forests – but this is because it is about a sort of knowledge that is not amenable to, not available to, the sort of “proof” we have come to accept. It is an imaginative rather than a logical connection.

Song for the Basilisk by Patricia McKillip

This was the first book I read for my birthday season, from an author I’ve been meaning to revisit for ages, ever since hearing about Patricia McKillip’s passing back in May, 2022. I’m not entirely sure why I landed upon this one out of her entire oeuvre, but it contains many of her favourite subjects: morally ambiguous characters, court intrigue, heraldic animals, a fascination with bards, and a love of musical instruments.

That last one especially – this book is filled with viols, flutes, harps and picochets (the one-stringed instrument featured on the cover) and the story itself revolves around an elaborate opera being rehearsed and staged for the Arioso Pellinor, also known as the Basilisk, the ruler of Berylon and the book’s antagonist.

In what remains of a burnt-out palace, a child is pulled from the ashes of the fireplace and smuggled to the Isle of Luly, where bards are trained in the art of music. He is the sole survivor of House Tormalyne, eradicated by House Pellior so that they might seize power over the city of Berylon. Realizing he’s escaped certain death, the boy buries his memories, forgets his name, and loses himself within the music of his new home.

But thirty-seven years later, having married and sired a son of his own, he finds he can no longer ignore the nightmares of his past. Now calling himself Caladrius (after a bird whose song heralds death) he secretly accepts his identity as the heir of Tormalyne House and returns to Berylon in order to find the man responsible for slaughtering his entire family.

Berylon is a city filled with images of griffins, basilisks, phoenixes, and other fantastical creatures that represent the ruling houses of the elite, and even though House Tormalyne has been left in ruins, Caladrius soon discovers there are other revolutionaries in the city who are preparing for a strike against Arioso Pellior, the Basilisk.

Among them is a group of musicians who have been commissioned to supply the entertainment for Arioso’s upcoming birthday celebrations, and a young woman called Giulia Dulcet finds herself caught between trying to teach Arioso’s talentless daughter Damiet how to sing (though she’s more interested in what outfits she’ll be wearing) and her lover Justin, who is involved with the growing secret resistance against House Pellior.

McKillip puts all her pieces in place, then begins to weave them together in a story that culminates with the opera that’s being staged for the cruel tyrant – suffice to say, it does not go according to plan.

The first few chapters are a little slow, and the final few wrapped up a little too hurriedly, but all the characters are intriguing, none more so than Arioso’s youngster daughter Luna Pellinor. So like her father that it’s rumoured he created her himself, she’s an enigmatic figure throughout the book, someone who may or may not walk in her father’s footsteps. There’s also a surprising number of comedic characters, such as the overwrought Hexel, a composer in agony over having to arrange the opera for Arioso despite the man’s cruelty (and his lack of a muse), and Damiet, who obliviously carries on with her music lessons despite a complete lack of talent.

As I always say in any review about McKillip’s work: her very poetic-prose is an acquired taste, and takes a lot of getting used to. For my money, it never veers into full-blown purple prose, but it is very complex and dense, requiring your full attention at all times. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell what’s a well-crafted metaphor and what’s actually happening, but the rewards are immense if you take your time with it all, letting the words and the meanings they reveal across the course of the story gradually unfold. This makes them time consuming reads, but worth it.

And this time around, I wondered if this was inspired by George R.R. Martin’s magnum opus: not only the whole idea of ruling Houses at war with each other, but lines such as “the House remembers,” and “[the music] twists him into its deadly song of fire and ice.” This was published in 1998, two years after A Game of Thrones. Hmmm....

Well, even if it is true, Song for the Basilisk possesses the singular advantage over Martin’s work by being a standalone story with a beginning, middle and (most importantly) an END.

Treasure at the Heart of the Tanglewood by Meredith Ann Pierce

Do you like Persephone stories but hate the fact that Hades is always portrayed as the sexy kidnapper and Demeter as a Beloved Smother? Probably not, as fandom is completely obsessed with that dynamic, but on the off-chance that you are, this book might be for you. All those archetypes are present and accounted for here, but as a more fairy tale-esque Evil Wizard, Distressed (yet self-sufficient) Damsel and Wise Mother Figure.

The set up is a little like the one in Disney’s Tangled: a young girl lives by herself in what’s known as the Tanglewood, with only a few animal friends and an old wizard for company. From her hair grow shoots and flowers, which she plucks out regularly in order to make a draught that keeps the wizard young and virile. Sound a little familiar?

Aside from the folks of a nearby village who come to her for remedies, the only other people Hannah ever meets are a succession of nameless knights, who travel into the Tanglewood in search of its legendary treasure. Though she tries to dissuade them, having never seen such a treasure herself – only the terrible Golden Boar that roams the forest – they are fixated on their quest, no matter how many of them perish in the attempt.

But one day she meets a young knight that she falls in love with. Having rescued him from the boar, she nurses him back to health and calls him Foxkith. From him she learns that all the knights serve a Sorcerer-Queen, who is desperate to reclaim her lost treasure.

So what could this mysterious treasu – it’s Hannah. I mean, duh. That’s the problem with a lot of Meredith Anne Pierce’s stories; as much as I love her ideas and her prose, it’s so easy for the reader to discern what’s really happening. And because they do so long before the characters catch on, it has the unfortunate side-effect of making everyone seem rather obtuse.

Hannah ends up journeying into the world beyond the Tanglewood, discovering that her hair and clothing transform in colour and form as the seasons change around her. I’m sure you can fathom the Persephone angle at this point, though Pierce also utilizes the triple goddess motif, taking the usual Maiden, Mother and Crone triune and tweaking it into Maiden, Matron and Mother. (With this in mind, there’s also a nice emphasis on female relationships throughout – it’s no coincidence that Hannah is given hospitality by an older woman while travelling).

The book is also filled with old-fashioned words that help ground the fairy tale atmosphere; terms like cottars, haversack, poke, scrapple, bannock, vittles, wroth, ken, and kith. They’re a lot of fun to read, and Pierce is exceptionally good at crafting a fully-realized world in what is a relatively slim novel.

I was interested to note that the blurb at the back of the book promotes this as an “eagerly anticipated novel, Meredith Ann Pierce’s first in five years,” which suggests she had a reasonable following back in the day. But this was published in 2001, and ended up being her last novel. (That said, she’s not dead, so maybe one day we’ll see that follow-up to The Darkangel trilogy she once spoke of).

It’s a solid story, containing all the components of her work that I’ve always enjoyed, though I couldn’t help but feel there would be major changes if this was ever adapted to a visual medium – no doubt we’d get a face-to-face confrontation with the wizard instead of Hannah just declaring what she’ll do to him, and an on-screen reunion between her and Foxkith instead of just the implication it’ll happen.

In any case, I loved coming back to this, even if it was a little bittersweet knowing that Pierce hasn’t written another book since.

Utterly Dark and the Tides of Time by Philip Reeve

This is the third book in the Utterly Dark trilogy, and the reason I left it this long (the other first two were read exactly one year ago) is because I just didn’t want it to end – once a Philip Reeve story is over, it can’t be read for the first time ever again. You have to savour them while they last. Also, I wanted to read it during my birthday month, along with all my other favourite authors. As soon as I opened the book and saw the maps on the inside cover – one of Wildsea Island in 1812 and another in 1971 – I knew the trilogy was going out on a high.

At the end of the previous book, young Utterly made a deal with her mother, the Gorm, a primal goddess of the sea. In exchange for the Gorm destroying another ancient god to save Utterly’s friends, she has agreed to go back with her to the Hidden Lands, her mother’s watery home where few mortals have ever tread.

She has been given time in which to say farewell to her friends that dwell on the island of Wildsea, but now the spring has come and the Gorm come to fetch her own.

Utterly has made peace with her decision and goes without a fight, though her young friend Egg has noticed her distant behaviour over the winter and kept a careful watch over her. Though he’s unable to prevent her from leaving on a small skiff sent by the Gorm, he raises the alarm at her disappearance. He wants to mount a rescue mission immediately, but Utterly’s uncle Will and his wife Aish aren’t so sure that Utterly went to her mother unwillingly. It’s only when Will’s old friend Frank Constantine turns up some months later with a seafaring vessel and a full crew of men that Will sees an opportunity.

It's at this point the story divides into three distinct strands: Utterly learning how to swim through “the tides of time,” and so accidentally getting stranded in the year 1971, Egg being sent after her by the Gorm in a desperate attempt to get her back, and Will Dark’s adventures at sea onboard the Acantha – all of which become inextricably wound together thanks to the time-travelling angle.

As a device it’s not quite on the level of, say, Tom’s Midnight Garden, when it comes to being devastatingly clever, but Reeve knows how to use the tropes and expectations of the genre to his advantage. For instance, we get clues about what happened to the Acantha in 1971, long before the chapters following the vessel reaches its destination, thereby raising the suspense of what Will Dark is heading towards before he gets there.

There’s also plenty of lovely “full circle” moments when the past catches up to the present and you’re left with that satisfied sense of completion, like when the last jigsaw puzzle piece clicks into place.

I also loved that when Utterly and Egg travel to the future, it’s not 2023 (when the book was published) but 1971, allowing for several modern-day wonders to be discovered (at least in the eyes of our protagonists) while providing a degree of nostalgia for us, the reader. That’s the nature of time and progress for you. I’ve always been a fan of Fish Out of Temporal Waters (whether someone is going backwards or forwards) as it allows for a lot of insight on things we take for granted. Take Egg’s assumption that the kindly couple who take him in must be incredibly wealthy based on all the stuff they have in their house, even though he can’t understand why they don’t have servants, or when Utterly is taken by her mother back to prehistoric times:

Utterly shivered. For it had suddenly occurred to her that there were no other people in the world at all. There was only herself and the Gorm, and the Gorm was not exactly a person. Even Adam and Eve had not been created yet. Why, God was probably only just laying out the flowerbeds in the Garden of Eden. And as for Uncle Will, and Aish, and Egg, and the Skraevelings, and everyone else whom Utterly loved, why, none of them would be born for thousands upon thousands of years.

The vibes are very much “holiday seaside adventure” stories but with an undercurrent of the ancient and mystical – think The Famous Five mingled with Susan Cooper’s Greenwitch, or I Spy Treasure Hunt with Alan Gardner’s Weirdstone of Brisingamen. Pure bliss. As ever, Reeve’s most touching feature is that despite the cruelties of the world and the randomness of chance, there are always good, decent people that one can rely on, whether it’s a gang of kids on bikes, a kindly old couple, or a wise nature goddess.

On his website Reeve states he may return to the Autumn Isles one day – until then, what can we do to ensure that either Laika or Cartoon Saloon adapts these books?

Crooked House (2008)

This is one of those oddities that is most intriguing by the fact it exists at all – a three-part miniseries that tells of a haunted house and the effect it has on its owners through time, comprised of three largely unconnected stories and a lot of unanswered questions. It’s extremely short too – each episode is only a half-hour long.

The framing device involves Ben Morris (Lee Ingleby) taking a door knocker that he’s found buried on his property to be appraised by a local historian, who starts spinning him some stories of the estate that used to exist on the land his flat is currently built on. The first tells of Josephy Bloxham in the late eighteenth century, whose investment advice has enriched him, but ruined several others. Now renovating Geap Manor, Bloxham is seemingly haunted by noises coming from the new wainscoting.

The second episode revolves around Felix and Ruth, a newly engaged couple in the 1920s who are celebrating their pending nuptials at the Manor, only for the groom’s grandmother to advise them to marry elsewhere, lest they be haunted by the ghost of a betrayed bride that roams the halls. Ruth dismisses it as an attempt to scare her off, though she’s already seen a strange guest at the party, her face hidden behind a bridal veil...

The third and final centres on Ben in the present day, who is awoken in the early hours of the morning by a knocking at the door. Whenever he goes outside to investigate, no one is there... but whenever he turns to go inside again, he finds that the door leads to the long-since demolished interior of Geap Manor. And the inhabitants there seem to have a vested interest in him.

It’s a diverting enough watch, although not very scary, and... well, just a rather odd curiosity piece. I get the feeling it may have been compiled from a notebook of ideas that Mark Gatiss (who wrote all three episodes and appears as the curator) had lying about the place, which didn’t fit into any of his other projects and which he didn’t want to go to waste.

Along with Ingleby and Gatiss, the episodes also feature Julian Rhind-Tutt, Philip Jackson, Jean Marsh, Samuel Barnett and Daniela Denby-Ashe (I gasped when I saw her – it felt like she disappeared completely after North and South, even though it should have been her big break).

I’m not sure I can recommend it – it’s not staggeringly clever, but it isn’t terrible either. Just a quirky little offering, though its existence may make more sense if you take it as an entry in the A Ghost Story for Christmas anthology, a series I’ve been meaning to get to for a while now.

Great Expectations (2011 and 2012)

I recently watched Holliday Grainger guest-star on an episode of the BBC’s Robin Hood, and that put me in mind to watch some of her other period drama projects – namely Great Expectations, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Anna Karenina (not The Borgias though, as that’s too much of a time commitment). And once I’d done that, I realized there were other recent-ish adaptations of all three of these famous novels, which provided the perfect opportunity (and excuse) for a contrast/compare project.

Of the three books, I’ve only read Great Expectations, which is easily my favourite Dickens novel, not to mention one of my favourite books of all time, period. I have a copy of Anna Karenina ready and raring to go on my TBR pile (goodness knows when I’ll get to it though) but I have to admit I’m not too interested in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In other words, I don’t have a great well of expertise to draw upon when it comes to discussing these films in relation to their source material, so I’ll just have to compare them to each other instead.

Dickens’s most famous plot is surely A Christmas Carol, which has been adapted, parodied, homaged and modernized to hell and back, but for my money, Great Expectations is his greatest premise. There’s something so spine-tinglingly Gothic about a blacksmith’s boy who is plucked from happy poverty to become a playmate to a rich little foster girl who’s being groomed as a weapon to unleash upon society by a half-crazed woman who was jilted at the altar. Pip is essentially someone for Estella to practice on, and naturally he falls in love with her, exactly as Miss Havisham planned.

I mean, whew! What a summary! It is a story for which the word “intrigue” was invented.

According to Wikipedia there have been ten adaptations of the novel in television and on film, including the modernized Gwyneth Paltrow movie and an Australian-based miniseries, but the most interesting thing about the two I watched this month is that they were released in such quick succession: the BBC miniseries in 2011, and the Mike Newell film in 2012. As it happens, the two of them work in almost perfect tandem regarding what they chose to adapt: specifically that the miniseries drops Biddy and keeps Orlick, while the film omits Orlick and keeps Biddy.

Each version provides the missing subplot of the other, though the omissions also do a lot to render the tone of each version – the film is more romantic and bittersweet given that Pip loves and loses two very different women, while the miniseries leans more into the intrigue and Gothic trappings of the story’s underlying mystery. It’s really quite fascinating to behold.

As with all television and film adaptations, the former has the advantage of a longer runtime, while the latter has a bigger budget. Then of course, there’s the performances. I mean, we could argue all day about which performer did what role better, but for my money 2012 has a better Estella; 2011 has a better Magwitch (there’s always something so refined about Ralph Fiennes, while Ray Winstone is far more convincing as a salt-of-the-earth convict). 2012 is better at capturing the warmth and love between Joe and Pip, while 2011 gives us more insight into Havisham and Estella (I’ve no doubt there’s a well-meaning but terribly-written book out there that purports to tell their side of the story).

2012 has a more book-accurate Herbert Pocket (sorry Harry Lloyd) whilst 2011 has a much more terrifying Drummle (in 2012 he’s a smarmy peacock played by Ben Lloyd-Hughes – a case of Retroactive Recognition since I first saw this before he was in Sanditon – who will be punished by wedlock to Estella; in 2011 Tom Burke plays him as a brute that’s clearly more than a match for her. The miniseries leans into the irony that though she’s been designed to punish men, she ends up with one that doesn’t care whether or not she loves him, and is pretty clear when it comes to conveying that he’s physically abusive).

Also, 2011’s Oscar Kennedy is such a delightful Young Pip that it’s a shame when he grows up to be Douglas Booth (though I give the film credit for casting real-life brothers Jeremy and Toby Irvine as Pip at different ages, as you can certainly see the family resemblance there).

And the big kahuna: Miss Havisham. It’s impossible to choose between Gillian Anderson and Helena Bonham Carter, so we’ll just say that Anderson’s Havisham is more deranged and childlike, while Carter’s is more tempestuous and openly vindictive. I suppose Anderson just edges out Carter, since there’s a more subtle cruelty and petulance in her take on the character: this is a woman who knows full-well what she’s doing to and with Estella, and is eager to hear all the sordid details. It pushes her more into the villain than victim camp, despite coming across as far more vulnerable and mentally unsound. On that note, it’s interesting that the death of Anderon’s Havisham is staged as a slow and deliberate suicide, while Carter’s is a terrible accident.

Neither adaptation uses Dickens’s original ending, in which Pip only briefly reunites with Estella after she’s remarried, instead opting for a bittersweet but hopeful ending in which the would-be lovers find each other again. Suffice to say that Pip doesn’t end up going to Cairo in either one (though Pocket does in 2011, effectively disappearing from the story afterwards) but I have to say that the film actually does the better job at putting the pieces of the mystery together. In the miniseries, I’m not even sure if it spells out clearly that Magwitch was involved in the Miss Havisham wedding scam. It must have done, but I missed it somehow.

And in what is more a sin of the book than either of the adaptions, I’m always disappointed that Estella has to remain in the dark about her parentage. The girl needs therapy more than she needs a happily-ever-after with Pip, but what about Mollie? Does Estella ever get to meet her true mother? In the 2012 film she’s played by Tamzin Outhwaite, who I found so familiar before realizing I saw her guest-star in an episode of Hustle last month.

And naturally there’s a lineup of British talent to fill out the roster: Robbie Coltrane/David Suchet as Jaggers, Shaun Dooley/Jason Flemyng as Joe (nice to see them both playing good guys for a change), Sophie Rundle/Perdita Weeks as Clara, Mark Addy/David Walliams as Pumblechook, Sally Hawkins/Claire Rushbrook as Mrs Gargery, Susan Lynch as 2011’s Mollie, and Jack Roth as Orlick (he looked so familiar, but I honestly didn’t recognize him, even after seeing him so recently in the Globe Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet. It’s partly because he had blackened teeth and blemished skin in this, and partly because I don’t think I’ve ever seen him not play a poncey aristocrat before). Oh, and Ralph Ineson is here as well – I’d know that voice anywhere.

The two Estellas are played by Holliday Grainger and Vanessa Kirby, and I can’t deny that the latter is currently enjoying the more illustrious career at the moment, despite (IMO) being the weaker actress. I initially took her blank expression as a deliberate choice for Estella, but I’ve since seen her in a number of things (including The Crown as Princess Margaret) and it seems to how she always looks.

Anna Karenina (2012 and 2013)

This was the only drama in which Holliday Grainger was not the lead; that task instead falls to my old nemesis, Keira Knightley (not that she’s aware of this enmity, or of my existence). As I’ve said before, it’s nothing personal, but for whatever reason this actress just cannot disappear into a character for me; I’m always acutely aware that I’m watching an actress called Keira Knightley recite her lines, usually with that irritating locked-jawed, pursued lips, breathless “come hither” expression on her face that always seems so utterly affected.

It was also the story I had the least familiarity with: I knew it started with the famous quote about how all happy families are the same, all unhappy ones different, and ended with the titular character throwing herself in front of a train, but apart from that, all I had to go on was Russia.

The 2012 film was directed by Joe Wright, and is most notable for its decision not to shoot it as a period drama exactly, but as a staged performance in which the actors move through and around obvious backdrops and deliberate scene changes, as though the audience is sitting in a theatre, sitting in a cinema. But to what end? I’m not entirely sure what purpose this creative decision serves, or what difference it would have made if they’d just filmed it as a straightforward costume drama.

In comparison, the 2013 miniseries obviously has the advantage of a longer run-time in which to adapt more material from the doorstopper novel (over three hours to the film’s two hours, twenty minutes) but I ended up surprised at how similar they were in terms of what made it to the screen. Perhaps the miniseries simply unfolded at a more leisurely pace, as the only obvious difference between it and the film was Kitty’s sojourn volunteering in a German hospital.

And whereas the film was a feast for the eyes, the closest thing you’ll see to a musical in which no one actually sings a note; a spectacle of delicate choreography and ambiguous boundaries, the miniseries looks like it was made on a budget of twelve dollars. It may well have been filmed in one of those little towns that are built as period theme parks, and there’s very little opulence or grandeur to be found. Even the balls seem to take place in tiny living rooms. And don’t get me started on the shmaltzy soundtrack.

Yet everyone involved seems genuinely sincere about what they’re doing, none more so than Vittoria Puccini as Anna, who I obviously much preferred to the colder and more affected Keira Knightley. In Puccini’s eyes you see the conflict, longing, agony and reject she’s going through, and she’s paired with Santiago Cabrerra as Vronsky – say no more. The funny thing is, he’s not that great an actor, but in this case, he doesn’t have to be. All he has to do is turn on the smoulder and it’s obvious why Anna couldn’t resist.

But the film manages to pack in a number of characters that never made it into the miniseries which was rather surprising, and so many familiar faces pop up just to say a few lines and then disappear again: Olivia Williams, Pip Torrens, Ruth Wilson, Emily Watson, Emerald Fennell, Cara Delevingne, Hera Hilmar, Shirley Henderson, Holliday Grainger (the whole reason I watched this!) Kyle Soller, Henry Lloyd-Hughes – it’s packed to the rafters! In comparison, the only face I recognized in the miniseries was Santiago Cabrerra.

As someone who has never read the novel, I have to say that both adaptations fail in their most important scene: Anna’s suicide. We’re simply not given enough emotional context as to why she throws herself under that train. Shame? Depression? Perhaps she thought Vronsky was losing interest in her, and that she had nothing else to live for. But what about her son? Or failing that, her daughter?

I’m really not sure, and that’s a glaring flaw in both film and miniseries. I almost get the feeling that neither screenplay actually wanted her death to happen; that they would have preferred to give Anna a happily-ever-after with Vronsky and their daughter, and so forgot to depict the proper buildup to the event.

Watching both versions in quick succession, it was interesting to note what elements were highlighted in each one, and it seems to me the novel must be quite an unconventional one. Each time the story feels like it’s reached its natural conclusion (Anna gives birth to a daughter and makes her lover and husband reconcile in anticipation of her death; Anna and Vronsky leave for Italy to start a new life after Andrei promises her a divorce; Levin and Kitty get married) – it just keeps going, adding more obstacles and complexities until finally only the train is left. Heck, maybe that was Anna’s motivation: she just wanted the nonstop drama to finally come to an end.

If there’s a theme to be discerned from the adaptations, it’s the search for meaning – though some would call it happiness – and how futile it is. Likewise, it certainly didn’t escape my notice that Vronsky and Oblonsky face far less ostracism for carrying on extramarital affairs than Anna does, nor the irony that she first meets Vronsky as she’s travelling to her brother’s house in an attempt to save his marriage after he’s been caught cheating on his wife. The laws of God and Man come down considerably harder on some people than others.

Then there’s the entire B-plot of what can only be called Levin’s prolonged existential crisis over his life, and dude – stop overthinking it and get over yourself. I can tell he’s going to be beyond tedious when I crack open the novel.

Which I will, as it’s time to get to know Anna Karenina properly. I know how it all ends, and it’s scant comfort to know that at least she took her own way out (unlike Tess of the D’Ubervilles – men really do love a dead female protagonist, don’t they) but she also exists in rather astonishing contrast to Lady Chatterley...

Lady Chatterley's Lover (2015 and 2022)

... who, like Anna, embarks upon an extramarital affair, but is allowed to have her cake and eat it too when she acquires a divorce and drives away into the sunset with her gamekeeper lover. On the heels of Anna Karenina, it’s quite astounding that the narrative doesn’t punish her at all.

This BBC TV movie and Netflix feature have the longest gap between releases, but there was no other adaptation filmed between the two. D.H. Lawrence’s original novel became infamous at its time of publication for its racy content (which is completely blasé these days) and so the question of any adaptation is always how far they’ll actually go with it.

The BBC version is extremely tame, I suspect because it was designed to potentially be shown in high schools for those studying the novel, while the Netflix film goes whole-hog with the nudity, the sex, and the nude sex. Again, I’m left completely bemused that people are handwringing over the perceived lack of such things in films these days, as this one is solely about two people going for it all over the place.

The tweaks between the main characters and their dynamics are pretty interesting, and as much as I like Holliday Grainger, I have to say that the 2022 take on the material far exceeds the 2015 one. The simple truth is that the chemistry between Grainger and Richard Madden doesn’t even compare to what’s going on with Emma Corrin and Jack O’Connell – more importantly, their Connie and Oliver actually LIKE each other. They have conversations, they laugh together, they enjoy each other’s company beyond all the great wilderness sex they’re having.

When the story ends with each version of the couple leaving Wragby for a new life together, I can completely believe that Corrin and O’Connell’s characters will be happy together for the rest of their lives. Grainger and Madden’s? No way. They’ll be separated within a week, having realized they have nothing to talk about (and since their version is almost hilariously sexless in comparison to what goes on in 2022, they won’t even have that to fall back on either).

In fact, the BBC version does that irritating thing in which it attempts to build “chemistry” by having the characters squabble with each other as shorthand for sexual tension. I have no idea why writers continue to think this is a good idea. She comes across as cold and haughty, he just seems uncomfortable, and there’s no basic respect on either side. As such, the love affair seems to come out of nowhere.

It tries to lean more into the class differences between the two lovers, choosing to start the whole thing with scenes of Oliver getting caught up in the mining disaster that takes the life of Mrs Bolton’s husband, but no clear commentary on the subject ever really takes place. Speaking of Mrs Bolton, this character provided a rather stunning case of Retroactive Recognition, since she was played by none other than Jodie Comer. I watched this years ago, and it must have been well before her big breaks in The White Princess and Killing Eve.

In 2022, the character is played Joley Richardson, which is a Casting Gag since she played Lady Chatterley herself in a 1993 miniseries (where amusingly, Oliver was played by Sean Bean, who later played the father of Richard Madden in Game of Thrones, though choosing him for the role in 2015 was probably just a result of the whole “Britain has five actors” thing).

There’s an interesting contrast in the two Mrs Boltons; obviously Jodie Comer is young and beautiful, which creates a degree of tension in the marriage between Connie and Clifford, while Joley Richardson is a mature woman who – after initially trying to subtly warn Clifford about what’s going on between his wife and gamekeeper – ends up becoming more of an ally to the two lovers. It’s ultimately a lovely and unexpected portrayal of class and female solidarity, though I’ve no idea which take on the character is more faithful to the original novel.

As for Clifford, the 2022 version is rather nebbish and uncomfortable with sex right from the start, though 2015’s Edward Norton can’t help but come across as virile, and therefore more pitiable and emasculated when he loses the use of his legs. One gets the sense that Corrin’s Connie wasn’t exactly being sexually satisfied at any point during the marriage, while we get to see Grainger’s Connie’s first meeting with Clifford, and scenes establishing that the two of them had a perfectly normal sex life before the war (though weirdly, she seems surprised when he turns up at Wragby in a wheelchair – I’m pretty sure someone would have informed her of this fact long before he returned home).

I get a weird sense of pride from having seen actors in projects before their big break, and in this case I watched Emma Corrin in a few episode of Pennyworth well before she starred as Princess Diana in The Crown. She does well here, though I don’t think I’ve seen Jack O’Connell or Matthew Duckett in anything before, which actually made for a nice change. Faye Marsey appears too, in a smallish role as Connie’s sister.

The story itself is a strange one when you look at the basic plot: a woman leaves her crippled war veteran husband for the sake of good sex with the help. (Heck, in the 2015 version, he doesn’t even become a classist jerk until the final scene). There’s no real exploration into the morality of how it’s perhaps not good form to screw your employer’s wife or that Connie made a promise that she ultimately breaks to never abandon Clifford after he’s been injured (I’m not just talking about the marriage “in sickness and in health” vow, but a number of personal assurances she gives him).

And yet, this is also a story about a woman who is allowed to be carnal without shame or lasting consequences. It’s possibly more than she deserves even by today’s standards, but after Anna Karenina and Tess of the D’Ubervilles, and Fantine and Esmeralda, and who-even-knows how many more literary women that are punished for sexual transgressions – let Connie have this victory! Even the title speaks volumes. There’s The Time Traveller’s Wife and The Memory Keeper’s Daughter and The Tiger’s Wife and The Heretic’s Daughter, but Lady Chatterley’s Lover indicates that this particular man exists in relation to her. He’s the subject, but she claims ownership of both him and the title.

The Musketeers: D’Artagnan and The Musketeers: Milady (2023)

I’ve been excited about these ones for a while now, and probably would have made the effort to see them in cinemas... if they had been released in New Zealand, which I don’t think they ever were (unless there were some tiny arthouse theatres that carried them, though I certainly never saw it advertised).

It was also a headache trying to get hold of a copy: I tried finding it on streaming services, and through – *ahem* – piratical means, but nothing came with a decent set of subtitles. And then I did what I should have done first of all, and checked out the library catalogue. Yup, it turns out we had a copy on DVD the whole time, which solved all my problems at once.

The most exciting about this newest take on the famous Musketeers is the cast. Namely, Eva Green as Milady de Winter. Has there been a more perfect casting coup in recent history? It was largely for her sake that I was so excited about seeing this, though the trailer also promised a good old-fashioned adventure-romance-swashbuckling-historical-drama spectacle.

And for the most part, it delivered.

I have to admit, I have never actually read Alexander Dumas’s novel (or any of its sequels) though I know the gist of the major plot-points, most of which are replicated in any number of film and television adaptations. Here, we get the expected arrival of D’Artagnan to Paris, hoping to join the regiment of the King’s Musketeers. On the way he gets into an altercation with Milady de Winter (not that he’s aware of her identity at the time) and through a very clever/funny series of Character Establishing Moments, he ends up promising to duel our three other protagonists, Athos, Aramis and Porthos, for a variety of different reasons. He finds lodging at the home of one Constance Bonacieux, and soon finds himself caught up in the intrigues at court.

Political turmoil is brewing, as despite King Louis’s commitment to peace in the realm, his various advisors are hellbent on rousing trouble with the Protestants (it’s actually rather amusing to see them, rather than the Catholics, in the role of villain this time around). The familiar rogue’s gallery is present and accounted for: Cardinal Richelieu, Prince Gaston, Rochefort (albeit in a tiny, non-speaking role) and of course, Milady, their most valued agent.

Then there’s Queen Anne. Honestly, every time they make a Musketeers adaptation, this woman seems to have a different lover. In the BBC version it was Aramis, in The Man in the Iron Mask, it was D’Artagnan. Here it’s the Duke of Buckingham, whose secret rendezvous with her threatens not only her marriage to King Louis, but stability between their two nations.

This actually leads to one of the strangest things about this film: that our heroes are actually kind of awful. The three Musketeers are admonished by the King for illegal duelling, a crime they are 100% guilty of committing. The Queen is accused of having an affair with another man and gifting him with her diamond necklace... two things she very much did. At one point Aramis shoots a man’s pegleg out from under him before taking a crucifix off the wall and sharpening it into a shiv to torture him for information. You don’t have to be religious to recognize that as extremely blasphemous, and it’s all a little disconcerting to say the least.

Putting that rather troubling subtext aside, there’s a lot here to like. Lots of attractive men sword-fighting, on-location filming with sweeping shots of the scenery and minimal CGI, Eva Green in plenty of fun costumes and disguises, the plot moving forward by secret plans being discussed in prime eavesdropping locations, and tons of very impressive Oners. Seriously, there are some great shots throughout this.

Vincent Cassel was born to play Athos, just as Eva Green was a no-brainer for Milady, and Romain Duris is a very charming Aramis despite the whole torture-people-with-religious-artefacts thing. Louis Garrel makes for a more thoughtful, dignified Louis than what appeared in the BBC series (which makes Anne’s emotional affair even more unpleasant) though Pio Marmaï is rather underserved as Porthos. There’s a brief scene that established him as bisexual, and then that’s forgotten about for the rest of the film.

Also, all of the Musketeers have been aged up about two decades (meaning it’s weird that people keep referring to D’Artagnan as “a boy” when the actor is in his thirties) and I had to watch this at my friend’s house behind his blackout curtains since there’s no such thing as decent lighting in the movies anymore. But the whole thing ends with enough closure to be satisfying, whilst setting up the plot mechanics for Part II...

The Musketeers: Milady ends up being the second half of what is best described as one very long movie, which picks up right where the first left off. D’Artagnan has been captured along with Constance, and when he comes to in a prison cell, he finds himself with an unlikely ally: Milady de Winter. The two are forced to work together to escape their captors, and despite his feelings for Constance, D’Artagnan also finds himself drawn to this new and exciting presence in his life (who wouldn’t be, it’s Eva Green!)

There a half-a-dozen plots at work here, though the emotional thoroughfare is naturally Athos’s history with Milady (and his realization that she’s still alive) and D’Artagnan’s attempts to track down Constance. Now, as we all know, Constance is murdered by Milady in Dumas’s original novel, though various adaptations across the years have opted for a more upbeat ending and allowed her to live. So I was naturally on the edge of my seat when Constance and Milady ended up in each other’s company, with the latter scheduled for execution.

What the film ultimately goes for, I’m in two minds about. I suppose it’s better than the novel, in which Constance is poisoned largely out of spite, whereas here solidarity is established between the two women, with Constance choosing to switch her clothing with Milady while they’re alone in a locked room together so that she can escape the noose.

But then, once Milady is clear and the executioners arrive in order to escort her to her death, they (for whatever reason) don’t recognize Constance. She’s dragged kicking and screaming to the noose and duly hanged.

To make it even cruller, this occurs just as D’Artagnan and the other Musketeers arrive, and he hears her screams of terror just seconds too late. He gets her down from the gibbet, the knife twists with a Hope Spot in which she briefly revives, and then she dies in his arms. It’s pretty depressing, and casts a pall over the entire venture. I have a hideous irrational fear of accidentally being wrongly executed, and so the whole thing just seems unnecessarily cruel.

It reminded me of Marian’s fate in the BBC’s Robin Hood, which also tried to wring drama out of love failing and an innocent young woman dying decades before her time, and even though this was faithful to the novel in the sense that Constance doesn’t make it out alive, any adaptation that spares her life is an improvement on Dumas as far as I’m concerned.

It rather dampens my enthusiasm for rewatching it, or for getting excited about the next instalment that they’re apparently going to make, given that this film ends with Athos discovering Milady has kidnapped their young son from his bed.

Around the World in 80 Days: Season 1 (2021)

It ended up being a month for Jules Verne, with adaptations of two of his most famous novels: Around the World in 80 Days and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Neither one was particularly good, though this edges out Nautilus as the better of the two – and despite announcements that it has been cancelled (or at least not picked up for a second season) that doesn’t really matter as it comes to a definite conclusion with the journey completed and the wager won.

In 1872, Phineas Fogg (good old David Tennant) accepts a bet from a friend in his Gentleman’s Club that he can traverse the globe in just eighty days – though unbeknownst to him, Nyle Bellamy desperately needs the money and so plans to sabotage Fogg’s efforts.

Phineas is joined by Jean Passepartout, a waiter-turned-valet trying to escape woman troubles and Abigail “Fix” Fortescue, a wannabe journalist. They’re off, with plenty of adventures along the way, in which each episode visits a new country until their return to England: France, Italy, Yemen, India, China, Japan and America, not to mention a stint on a deserted island.

It’s a completely inoffensive lark, though the writing leaves a lot to be desired: in the first episode Passepartout meets his estranged brother in Paris, who leads him and Abigail to an abandoned building opposite a hotel where the Prime Minister is staying, because sure – when you’re about to assassinate a state official, take the brother you haven’t seen in years and a complete stranger along with you.

For whatever reason, the police haven’t secured a prime hideout for an assassination, and neither Passepartout or Abigail are restrained as the hit takes place, allowing them to wander over to the window and call out to Phineas, who is shot but saved when the bullet bounces off a flask in his shirt pocket.

All three of them then run to an address to retrieve a hot air balloon, which the owner doesn’t want them to have, to the point that he tries to fend them off at gunpoint. Why then, is the balloon already inflated? It takes only a quick pep talk from Phineas for this guy to go from “hell no,” to “sure, why not?” all while the cops are trying to knock down his door.

That pretty much sums up the show in its entirety: vaguely awkward.

Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the whole journey meant to take place in the hot air balloon? Because the trio are usually depicted as travelling on boats and trains, and I suspect it’s because the balloon proved to be too expensive for the show to maintain. (Though I have to confess, I haven’t read the book).

Alongside Tennant are Britain’s five actors, as a show like this is tailormade for fun guest appearances and character actors.

This guy!

That guy!

As well as Lindsay Duncan, Victoria Smurfit, Richard Wilson, Gary Beedle and John Light (who I found incredibly familiar before realizing I saw him play Oberon in the filmed Globe Theatre production a couple of months ago). Many of them play real-life figures such as Bass Reeves, Jane Digby and Adolphe Thiers.

Like I said, it’s pretty inoffensive, though I took umbridge when Fogg’s lost love Estella turns up in the final episode and tells him: “you are a brilliant man put on this earth to do brilliant things.” Are you kidding me? He sat on his ass for twenty years while SHE was out in the world, having adventures. I much rather would have seen her life.

Nautilus: Season 1 (2023)

For someone who is constantly complaining about prematurely cancelled shows, I do realize that I end up watching a lot of them. I suppose it’s like my compulsion to defend (most) unpopular characters, and in the case of projects that get canned, I want those that worked on them to know that at least one person watched them. Also, I’m just plain curious about things that fail.

Nautilus is the show that rather infamously got cancelled before it even had a chance to air, which only had the effect of making me extra intrigued by it. Especially since the premise felt like a slam-dunk: the backstory of Captain Nemo and the prequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, detailing how he came to captain the Nautilus in the first place.

Unfortunately, it’s not good, existing somewhere on the spectrum between one of the later Pirates of the Caribbean movies (bad but mildly entertaining) and Dinotopia (complete pants). It’s profoundly silly and inconsistent in a lot of annoying ways, largely due to the complete lack of logistics. At one point Nemo swims underwater with no breathing apparatus for what feels like half an hour, but later it’s a big deal that they reach someone in a diving suit before her air runs out. In another episode, the entire crew catch a mysterious illness that causes them to have vivid hallucinations, and though it nearly kills them all, it then just goes away of its own accord.

Despite the ocean being a pretty big place, the Nautilus and the dreadnought sent to catch her keep coincidentally running into each other, and at one point, a character on said dreadnaught asserts their vessel is faster than the Nautilus. A dreadnaught, faster than a submarine.  What.

The villains are painfully cartoonish: Lord Snooty McMoustache not only has the authority to keep undermining the captain’s orders, but cold-bloodedly murders a fellow officer in front of a crewmember without any expectation that it’ll be reported. Later the captain allows him to drop underwater bombs on the submerged Nautilus, even though he KNOWS that an Englishwoman is aboard. Said Englishwoman has a goofy fiancé who invites himself onboard the dreadnaught to help track her down, and suddenly turns violent at the drop of a hat.

Also, stuff just keeps happening. The crew of the Nautilus escape captivity, then they fight a giant squid, then they fight castaways on a deserted island, then they stop some whalers from killing a mother whale, then they discover Atlantis, then they escape underwater volcanos, then the submarine malfunctions and they all nearly drown... there is no downtime to any of this, and I’m pretty sure nobody sleeps for about a week.

It’s staged a bit like The Odessey or Jason and the Argonauts, involving a succession of adventures that occur in one place after another, with a lot of Star Trek-esque throwing themselves around the set when anything hits the sub. Basically too much happens, far too quickly, and as a result we don’t really get to know any of the Nautilus crew outside of Nemo and the unfortunately-named Humility Lucas.

Speaking of, there are some astonishing similarities when it comes to the female leads in this and Around the World in 80 Days: both curly redheads, both spirited and ambitious, and both trying to make a name for themselves in a male-dominated field. For Abigail it’s journalism, and for Humility it’s engineering.

Continuing the comparison, both shows have a fake, stage-like quality to them. You can just tell the actors are performing in front of green screens, and though the budget is high enough to avoid any truly awful shots, it’s also too low to provide full, seamless immersion. Likewise, some of the CGI (especially on creatures like the whale and giant eel) look like they were rendered twenty years ago. Sometimes it’s better to go with dodgy but tactile practical effects.

There was a nice ensemble cast here, but we don’t get to know any of the Nautilus crew in any great detail. No one ends up feeling like a real person, though I did appreciate the inclusion of a Maori actor with a full moko. Kiwi rep! It was also quite amusing to see Luke Arnold play the exact opposite of his character from Black Sails (he’s gone from a pirate to a Company man) and like 80 Days, this was a prime project for familiar faces popping in for a quick pay check and an extended cameo: Richard E. Grant, Bruce Spence, Anna Torv and Noah Taylor to name a few.

It’s a shame in a way, as it was a genuinely solid premise, and Shazad Latif deserves a decent lead role after so long, especially when playing someone as iconic as Captain Nemo.