I'm not a fan of the original movie. It obviously took a lot of work and was intended to be taking series, but I think the end result is rather boring and surprisingly hollow. It went for thematic depth, but ended up being an extremely simple story. It had a lot of nice little touches, but that was about it.
This series on the other hand? This was fucking epic. It's a manifestation of what the original wanted to be. The world feels much larger and lived in, the violence and horror is much more striking and the characters are far more developed, nuanced and real. Even the puppetry looks way better (there were some scenes in the original where they very clearly used real people for distant shots). The dialogue and plotting is simply on a metric above. Just look at the scene between the Chamberlin and Rian in the carriage.
However, it's not without some problems. It features, roughly, three main protagonists and the Skeksies get almost half the screen time too. Augra and a gelfling antagonist we follow a lot. This doesn't slow down the story much, surprisingly, a lot still happens each episode, however it does make the show feel a bit discoordinated. Starting with a smaller number of principal characters and expanding the cast slowly as the show goes on might have worked better. It's also a bit, I don't want to say cliche, as it is very original in many regards, primarily its designs. Maybe kitsch is a better descriptor. It's good, but it's also very much high fantasy and doesn't really strive to go beyond it's genre. If one is an enthusiast of high fantasy this isn't necessarily a negative at all.
In short, a series I was expect little from, but continued to delight with its high quality in basically every aspect of production. Hope it can be maintained in future seasons (though I expect it'll take them a while to bring out anymore). If you've come here with even a passing interest in giving the show a watch, then I definitely recommend you do.
Well that was far better than I expected
I'm not a fan of the original movie. It obviously took a lot of work and was intended to be taking series, but I think the end result is rather boring and surprisingly hollow. It went for thematic depth, but ended up being an extremely simple story. It had a lot of nice little touches, but that was about it.
This series on the other hand? This was fucking epic. It's a manifestation of what the original wanted to be. The world feels much larger and lived in, the violence and horror is much more striking and the characters are far more developed, nuanced and real. Even the puppetry looks way better (there were some scenes in the original where they very clearly used real people for distant shots). The dialogue and plotting is simply on a metric above. Just look at the scene between the Chamberlin and Rian in the carriage.
However, it's not without some problems. It features, roughly, three main protagonists and the Skeksies get almost half the screen time too. Augra and a gelfling antagonist we follow a lot. This doesn't slow down the story much, surprisingly, a lot still happens each episode, however it does make the show feel a bit discoordinated. Starting with a smaller number of principal characters and expanding the cast slowly as the show goes on might have worked better. It's also a bit, I don't want to say cliche, as it is very original in many regards, primarily its designs. Maybe kitsch is a better descriptor. It's good, but it's also very much high fantasy and doesn't really strive to go beyond it's genre. If one is an enthusiast of high fantasy this isn't necessarily a negative at all.
In short, a series I was expect little from, but continued to delight with its high quality in basically every aspect of production. Hope it can be maintained in future seasons (though I expect it'll take them a while to bring out anymore). If you've come here with even a passing interest in giving the show a watch, then I definitely recommend you do.