Director Zhora Kryzhovnikov announced that he plans to create three seasons of the series “The Boy’s Word,” implying that the story will not end with the traditional happy ending...
'Shadow and Bone' - Everything You Need to Know About the New Netflix Series
Butcher79
"Shadow and Bone" is a fantasy about a country very much reminiscent of the Russian Empire of the XNUMXth century.
Netflix premiered the fantasy series Shadow and Bone, which has been compared to Game of Thrones in the media. This is a film adaptation of the tsarpunk cycle by the writer Lee Bardugo (the genre she invented is based on the aesthetics of the Russian Empire and the countries of Eastern Europe). The show tells about a country divided by a canyon of eternal darkness - the abode of bloodthirsty monsters. The main character, the girl Alina, discovers in herself a magical power that can help defeat evil. Pavel Voronkov, film critic of Gazeta.Ru, tells what Shadows and Bones lacks to become a truly unique show.
Orphan Alina Starkova (Jesse Mei Lee from Edgar Wright's upcoming horror film Last Night in Soho) - A young soldier from the country of Ravka. More precisely, its eastern part, which has long been separated from the rest of the world by a giant magical canyon inhabited by bloodthirsty monsters. Evil cannot go beyond the canyon (which looks more like a wall), so it doesn’t bother most people, but people from the east have to go there regularly, since most of the resources are in Western Ravka. Once Alina's best friend, the tracker Mel (Archie Renault), are included in the next canyon group. In order not to part with her beloved, the girl also joins the team. When the squad is expectedly attacked by monsters, the power of the sun conjurer wakes up in Alina - magical energy with which you can destroy the canyon and unite the country again.
In winter, we included the series "Shadow and Bone", based on the cycle of writer Leigh Bardugo, in list the most anticipated show of the year: there was hope that it would partially compensate for the lack of Slavic flavor in the adaptation of The Witcher with Henry Cavill. Mainly intriguing was the declared genre of "tsarpunk" (by analogy with steampunk), which Bardugo herself invented, looking at the aesthetics of the Russian Empire and the countries of Eastern Europe. In the world of “Shadows and Bones”, the state of Ravka is ruled by Tsar Peter, people with magical abilities are called “grishas” (fans dubbed the universe of Bardugo “grishavers”), there are the cities of Kribirsk and Novokribirsk, there is the island of Kerch, and so on.
Now that the first season of the show has finally come out, I want to withdraw my aspirations. “Shadow and bone” cannot even be called cranberries: in fact, the cat cried “royal” here, and it comes down to linguistic eroticism - well, of course, “Grisha”, funny toponyms, sometimes mutter something like “moya tsaritsa”, but somehow under the nose. Otherwise, this is a smoothed, average fantasy, which in an aesthetic sense loses even to the "Disney" kitsch "The Nutcracker and the Four Kingdoms", to say nothing of the grandiose "Great". Instead of the conditional pseudo-Russian style with bulging domes, something near-Victorian looms on the screen; nothing more exotic than colorful overcoats and earflaps, evoking police officers insulated for the winter, gets into the frame.
But here's the thing. When Netflix did the same with The Witcher, the adaptation of Andrzej Saratowski's books still remained a premium product, looking into the mouth of Game of Thrones. “Shadow and Bone” sits comfortably in the niche of “Netflix” teenage fantasy (from the latter, say, “Warrior Nun” and “Cursed”) and does not particularly try to pretend to be something more.
All this magnificence is written, apparently, indeed, by some kind of neural network, which, however, has obvious problems with self-learning, since it does not get better over the years. This in itself is not that outrageous. Well soap and soap. God bless them, with dubious acting work (the character of Ben Barnes amusingly combines elements of the filmography of the artist who played in The Chronicles of Narnia and Dorian Gray), clumsy exposition remarks, characters with extremely vague motivation and immortality convenient for the plot (monsters, bows, machine gun (!) - at least henna). In the process, you can be distracted by the phone as much as you like, and along the way you come across amazing things like Chekhov’s, ahem, goat — and for that, in general, thanks.
Another thing is that every third such project reeks of missed opportunities. Either Netflix, which promotes the glockal philosophy, is in some cases afraid to really take risks, or some filmmakers consider such a level of immersion in the material to be quite sufficient, but in the end some kind of cunning comes out: we kind of pay for tsarpunk, but we get punk at best. Yes, and that one - with the prefix "pop" in the worst sense.
Was the article helpful?
