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The Witcher: Evil is Evil


AncalagonTheBlack

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I loved it, but I think the presentation of the timelines, have worked against its popularity.

A lot of this is a structural challenge where you have a series of tales while your trying to present a overall story on screen, it doesn't help when you have a bard where your just wishing he'd get killed off. Didn't care for the actor much lol.

Maybe the segue's needed to be more pronounced somehow?

Still liked this, it doesn't have to be Canterbury Tales or Game of Thrones for me for me to enjoy it.

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9 hours ago, Ran said:
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I suspect the final battle was probably due to budget shortfall. Not weird for an ambitious show in its first season to run out of budget and having to cut corners.

 

That's assuming that these scenes were shot in the order we see them.  That's not how it works.

 

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2 hours ago, SpaceChampion said:

On episode 3....  Just figuring out there are different timelines.  So what story is when now??  Cirilla, Geralt and Yennifer -- is that 3 timelines or 2?

I think Yennifer's story starts maybe about 40-50 years before Ciri's and Geralt's starts about 20 years before Ciri's, by the end of the series they will all have converged.

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8 hours ago, Zorral said:

That's assuming that these scenes were shot in the order we see them.  That's not how it works.

 

Filming started in late October of last year, and was wrapped in late May,  so about 30 weeks for 8 episodes. Reporters visited the Sodden set during the filming of the episode on April 9 and 10 , and  many of the actors and crew started announcing they wrapped a couple of weeks later. Feels like the final episode was filmed next to last. Saving your biggest production challenge for the end, more or less, is pretty common... and not having much money to actually achieve what you wanted by that time is also not unknown for this genre.

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Witcher at 2nd position, even though it came out just recently!

 

Netflix's "The Witcher" is the most in-demand TV show in the world, according to data company Parrot Analytics.

The fantasy series dethroned Disney Plus' "The Mandalorian" as the top global series.

"The Witcher" is also one of Netflix's most popular series in the US, second only to "Stranger Things," the streaming company said on Monday.

"The Witcher" is a hit with audiences despite poor reviews from critics.

https://www.businessinsider.com/witcher-passed-mandalorian-as-biggest-tv-show-in-the-world-2019-12

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I struggled through the first episode. But it was painful. I've read the books so I was interested to see what it would be like. 

Things which were ok: Geralt (generally), the fight scene. Ummm...that's all.

Things which were not ok: all the other acting, dialogue, the battle scene... Everything really.

The most wooden bit of all was the Ciri plus grandmother exposition banquet scene. Jesus. Impossible to care what happens to any of these people. 

I'm going to try one more episode but from the sounds of things, I'm not going to like that one any better. 

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This show reminds me a bit of 'the Magicians' in that there's a touch of modern archness in a fantasy setting. That show has a lot more link to the modern, real world of course. 

 

I guess it would be more like 'the Magicians' if they killed off Geralt to give way more screen time to some irritating bit character but fingers crossed they don't. 

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On 12/31/2019 at 1:36 AM, Corvinus said:

@Toth small spoiler regarding the fight scenes

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IMO, the one in the first episode was the best, and things go downhilll from there, mostly.

Also, the battle in the first episode was Hollywood trash of its stinkiest quality, but I suppose it didn't matter that much in the grand scheme of the story other than showing which side lost.

However: if you don't have the budget to make a decent battle, there's always an option of not even trying, and doing something both cheaper and creative instead. Like the Battle of Pharsalus in HBO's "Rome": Pompey the Great, not so great anymore, recounting the events of the battle while drawing a tactical map with a stick in dirt. At least one battle in an early season (Season 1 mayhaps?) of "Game of Thrones" got a similar "tell, don't show" treatment. And in one episode of "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" the director put the camera at the bottom of a pool - it didn't see shit, and the sequence was probably more impressive and memorable than anything they could do with infinite budget.

I personally would prefer something like that, instead of the half-assed battle of Cintra we got the dubious privilege of seeing.

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8 hours ago, AncalagonTheBlack said:

Witcher at 2nd position, even though it came out just recently!

 

Netflix's "The Witcher" is the most in-demand TV show in the world, according to data company Parrot Analytics.

The fantasy series dethroned Disney Plus' "The Mandalorian" as the top global series.

"The Witcher" is also one of Netflix's most popular series in the US, second only to "Stranger Things," the streaming company said on Monday.

"The Witcher" is a hit with audiences despite poor reviews from critics.

https://www.businessinsider.com/witcher-passed-mandalorian-as-biggest-tv-show-in-the-world-2019-12

It's funny, I just read some article yesterday from Vox or Vanity Fair or something where they were complaining about the series being released all on the same day, as opposed to weekly. They were arguing that the Witcher will never reacht he popularity of other shows like the Mandalorian until Netflix takes note of Disney Plus's model. Forbes maybe. They hate when shows are released all at once.

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Note that that's a global listing -- The Mandalorian is largely unavailable outside of North America for a few months more.

I do think the general point is correct that dropping everything for binge viewing kills anticipation and online discussion. In a couple of weeks there'll hardly be any discussion in this thread, I expect. Right now we've something like 140 posts since release in the prior thread, another 30 or so here, so ... 170 posts, vs. (by way of comparison) the Mandalorian  spoiler thread being over 400 posts and counting.

There's definitely value in releasing shows on a weekly basis. Game of Thrones would not have become what it became if it was all dumped on a single day each year.

ETA: To be fair, I should say that one reason The Mandalorian could have a lot more discussion is the puzzle of how various things fit into the Star Wars universe. Many viewers of The Witcher likely won't have any grounding in the setting and so that aspect of discussion won't exist. Still, some viewers do, thanks to reading the books or playing the games, and still, these things are going to fall by the wayside relatively quickly. 

 

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I quite liked it. The fight scenes were good, and the acting from the leads was solid. Cavill dispelled all my doubts about him here, and the guy playing Dandelion made me like the character far more than his game version; he's both cringeworthy and charming, as he should be. I'm glad they showed Yennefer's backstory, as she can be hard to like without knowing it. There are some flaws of course. Some of the cgi was dodgy, and the Nilfgaardians aren't quite right. I don't approve of Mousesack's altered fate, Yennefer fighting with swords instead of magic, and Vilgefortz being defeated by Cahir. All these black actors playing white characters and creatures from European folkore in a medieval Europe analogue continues to look ridiculous. And the ending was very abrupt. But dispite all that, it was a good show. I'll come back for season 2.

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5 hours ago, Shaun Snow said:

All these black actors playing white characters and creatures from European folkore in a medieval Europe analogue continues to look ridiculous. And the ending was very abrupt. But dispite all that, it was a good show. I'll come back for season 2.

The Witcher is actually a post-apocalyptic fantasy in which all of the humans are descended from people from our future who flee through portals to another world to escape some kind of terrible fate (this event, the Conjunction of the Spheres, is mentioned quite a few times in the show). As a result it makes perfect sense for ethnic groups to be all mixed up and diversified, especially as the Conjunction is still relatively recent (twelve centuries or so).

Sapkowski's powers of description are also not exactly on fire. The vast majority of characters get no more than perfunctory descriptions, at best, so this constant claim that all of the characters are lily white is also dubious.

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22 hours ago, Ran said:

Note that that's a global listing -- The Mandalorian is largely unavailable outside of North America for a few months more.

I do think the general point is correct that dropping everything for binge viewing kills anticipation and online discussion. In a couple of weeks there'll hardly be any discussion in this thread, I expect. Right now we've something like 140 posts since release in the prior thread, another 30 or so here, so ... 170 posts, vs. (by way of comparison) the Mandalorian  spoiler thread being over 400 posts and counting.

There's definitely value in releasing shows on a weekly basis. Game of Thrones would not have become what it became if it was all dumped on a single day each year.

ETA: To be fair, I should say that one reason The Mandalorian could have a lot more discussion is the puzzle of how various things fit into the Star Wars universe. Many viewers of The Witcher likely won't have any grounding in the setting and so that aspect of discussion won't exist. Still, some viewers do, thanks to reading the books or playing the games, and still, these things are going to fall by the wayside relatively quickly. 

 

Fair enough. I like the binge, and I hate the wait, but you have great points. The Mandalorian certainly was part of the cultural language for a longer period of time than the Witcher will be (whatever its popularity)--though Stranger Things is a huge phenomenon released in the same way. I don't know if I would've gotten hooked on ST had it been weekly, and that might be true of the Witcher too (if I hadn't been a huge fan already). 

46 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The Witcher is actually a post-apocalyptic fantasy in which all of the humans are descended from people from our future who flee through portals to another world to escape some kind of terrible fate (this event, the Conjunction of the Spheres, is mentioned quite a few times in the show). As a result it makes perfect sense for ethnic groups to be all mixed up and diversified, especially as the Conjunction is still relatively recent (twelve centuries or so).

Sapkowski's powers of description are also not exactly on fire. The vast majority of characters get no more than perfunctory descriptions, at best, so this constant claim that all of the characters are lily white is also dubious.

I have a hard time with the mixed race arguments too. Even if it was a fantasy land of white people, why does it even matter at all how the races are represented on screen? I never found it distracting at all, and Sapokowski's descriptions are always left pretty lacking as you noted. 

I never thought of the Conjunction of the Spheres how you described, but in my opinion, you summed up perfectly why this should be a diversified cast. That's super cool.

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2 hours ago, Simon Steele said:

I never thought of the Conjunction of the Spheres how you described, but in my opinion, you summed up perfectly why this should be a diversified cast. That's super cool.

It's the same thing as Wheel of Time, where first the Age of Legends (where anyone can teleport anywhere at any time, effectively, even around the world to go to work) made the world a completely multicultural and multiethnic blend, and then the Breaking jumbled everything up further.

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