Last night I finished watching the Netflix 4-part TV adaptation of Anthony Doerr’s novel ‘All the light we cannot see.’
It was April 2016 when I read this book so I had to check my blog to see whether I enjoyed it. I really did. But I certainly didn’t enjoy the TV adaptation. The endlessly feel-good dialogue seemed to be plagiarised from a self-help book: time and again there were snippets of trite philosophy. Ordinary people don’t talk like this!
Then there were the characters. Apart from Werner, the young orphan press-ganged into the Wehrmacht, the Nazis were uniformly evil. The French were uniformly wonderful. This is a playground world of goodies and baddies. Talk about an insult to the intelligence of the viewers.
The blind girl was cute when she was little and beautiful when she was older; she was brave to the point of being stupid (surely even courageous people have occasional moments when they are afraid, when they have second thoughts). And, of course, she was the catalyst that led all those around her to review their lives and make changes for the better, such as curing Uncle Etienne's claustrophobia. She was a sort of 'touch me and be healed' saint.
The book has so much more nuance; the script threw it all away.
From other reviews:
It was April 2016 when I read this book so I had to check my blog to see whether I enjoyed it. I really did. But I certainly didn’t enjoy the TV adaptation. The endlessly feel-good dialogue seemed to be plagiarised from a self-help book: time and again there were snippets of trite philosophy. Ordinary people don’t talk like this!
Then there were the characters. Apart from Werner, the young orphan press-ganged into the Wehrmacht, the Nazis were uniformly evil. The French were uniformly wonderful. This is a playground world of goodies and baddies. Talk about an insult to the intelligence of the viewers.
The blind girl was cute when she was little and beautiful when she was older; she was brave to the point of being stupid (surely even courageous people have occasional moments when they are afraid, when they have second thoughts). And, of course, she was the catalyst that led all those around her to review their lives and make changes for the better, such as curing Uncle Etienne's claustrophobia. She was a sort of 'touch me and be healed' saint.
The book has so much more nuance; the script threw it all away.
From other reviews:
- The Guardian: 2/5: “punting down the River Twee into Triteland"
- New York Times: "dangerously cheesy and sentimental ... though not in fatal doses"
- Rotten Tomatoes: 22%: "nauseatingly sentimental ... thuddingly obvious ... shockingly shallow"
- Time Magazine: "a schmaltzy, incoherent mess"
- The Independent: 2/5: "a shonky, star-studded dud"
- Variety: "sentiment and moral simplicity"
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