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Dark - German Netflix series

Started by Butchers Blind, December 08, 2017, 01:20:48 PM

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Butchers Blind

Anyone else been watching this? 
An enjoyable mix of time-travel, wormholes, paradoxes and small town dramas.  Manages just about to hold all its ideas together but requires paying attention to remember who's meant to be who. 
People have wrongly been labelling it the German Stranger Things as its, in my opinion, far better and thought out than that series.

surreal

Only watched the first 2 - had to switch off the dubbing as it was bloody awful and went back to German audio and English subs.  Seemed intriguing, hoping to watch some more this weekend

Butchers Blind

Yeah,  I went straight for the subtitled version.  Dubbed always feels jarring.

phes

Watched the lot of this. I thought it was very good even though there was little i could identify about it that I loved. There's a bit of hokum in there but overall I found it pretty gripping and at times quite chilling. Great acting. Translation seemed like it might be somewhat simplified but wasn't jarring. After Mindhunter that's two decent ones from Netflix that i've seen in a row which somewhat makes up for the absolute fucking bilge of Ozark and Stranger Things 2.

If I had one complaint it would be re. the end. The almost complete lack of resolution and the now ubiquitous resetting for season two (as a time-war type thingy). It always feels like such a cop-out but you know it's inevitable

Sebastian Cobb

Series 2 of this appears to be dropping on the 21st.

hillbillyholiday

Season 2 is bloody marvellous, although it's not a patch on Season 3...

Icehaven

I'm about halfway through series 1 at the moment. I'd assumed it was from this year as it's June 2019 when it starts, but now I see it's actually nearly 2 years old so was set in the near future when it was first released? Anyway I'm enjoying it mostly but finding it incredibly difficult to remember who is a young/old version of who, who is in which family and various other connections relevant to their interactions and the plot. Doesn't help that they all look so Teutonic, have stereotypically German names and all dress the same either, or that bar the cars and mobile phones 1986 looks almost exactly the same as 2019.

Inspector Norse

Quote from: icehaven on August 06, 2019, 02:19:52 PMI'm enjoying it mostly but finding it incredibly difficult to remember who is a young/old version of who, who is in which family and various other connections relevant to their interactions and the plot.

Yeah, I just watched the first series and also found that a bit difficult, although the occasional splitscreen montages showing the same character in different eras were done very well, I found. The issue I think was that there were simply a few too many characters who didn't get enough time to establish themselves, whichever period they were in, so it was hard to figure out who they were when they cropped up as their younger or older selves as well.
I also found the way the whole thing revolved around four or five families a bit hard to swallow, and the plotting was somewhat jerky with the two strands - family drama and time travel CHAOS - sometimes getting in each other's way rather than being satisfyingly tangled, or the focus seemingly shifting a bit too much in one direction.

Still, I don't want to complain too much as there was a lot of intelligent and exciting TV in there and the relationships were handled subtly and often touchingly. I had ignored it as some churned-out Euroschlock, a teeny Twin Peaks knockoff, but it was actually an impressive and interesting show that deserved better than the lukewarm reception it got when it came out. Looking forward to getting into series 2.

hillbillyholiday

You really do have to pay very close attention. The fansites even had to invent their own specialist terminology to properly discuss the second season.

If you are at the point of covering your walls with photos and linking them with red string, this will help greatly:

https://dark.netflix.io/

Ja'moke

I finally got round to watching this series. I'm a sucker for time-travel stuff in general, and I really enjoyed Series 1. I agree with others that it can be a little hard to keep track of who is who at times, but they did a great job in the casting department for the most part; some of the younger actors look really like their older actor counterparts.

Series 2 didn't grab me as much as the first, and in fact, it started to veer into laughably ridiculous territory. Way too many "I am the future version of this person you know" twists. It's going to get to the point where they reveal every character is actually the same person.

Inspector Norse

Quote from: Ja'moke on September 12, 2019, 04:02:38 PM
Series 2 didn't grab me as much as the first, and in fact, it started to veer into laughably ridiculous territory. Way too many "I am the future version of this person you know" twists. It's going to get to the point where they reveal every character is actually the same person.

Yeah, watched it now and I agree with this to an extent. I still enjoyed it but they seemed to put the plot twists into overdrive and it was a bit too much the way every single character suddenly seemed to be zipping backwards and forwards in time - although I think that the uncertainty about whether or not Adam really is Jonas is effective rather than being too obvious one way or another.
I thought it was more effective in the first series when it focused on the established relationships and dramas in each year, which made the tragedy at its heart more effective. Now the sci-fi side has taken over too much and it lessens the impact of the emotional, human interactions, giving the characters less time to spend with each other and more time jumping around.
On the other hand, it's still really well-filmed and -acted (it really is fantastic the way they've so effectively found actors with resemblances to play the same characters at different ages, or indeed put together families who really resemble each other) and the plotting is largely engrossing and unpredictable, although the very final scene made me worry that sharks and jetskis were lurking round the corner.

Thomas

#11
Bumping an old-ish thread - but that's time travel for you baby

I'm six eps into this and finding it a real slog. It's full of elements I should love - yer time travels, yer gloomy intrigues, yer ominous small town oddness (I loved Twin Peaks series three, after all, and I remember enjoying that French series The Returned, which had a similar tone) - but for some reason this isn't compelling me at all.

I've realised that anything could happen to any of these characters, and it'd elicit little more than a passive 'yeah, fine'. X is Y from the future? Yeah, fine. X is with Z, but Z is actually W? Okay. The time travel is caused by that? Sure, whatever, I guess it is. Not sure what I'm missing. I have failed to be consumed by its world.

Perhaps I'm in the wrong frame of mind.

Anyone else been watching it since this thread was last touched? I'm a completist, and I like to give things a fair chance - I'll crawl to the finale - push on to Moscow - but it'll have to really grab me in the next three episodes if I'm going to give series two a go.

Hand Solo

I couldn't be getting on with it either after my friends constantly recommending it to me. They've done that with a few others though and I lose interest fairly quickly.. The Outsider and things like that. I'm not sure it's me or that a lot of series run out of steam for their initial concept a few episodes in and it just turns into a soap opera with a bit of sci-fi thrown in. Devs was another I couldn't get through beyond 3 - 4 episodes.

I was recommended Lost for years but I astutely assumed it was a load of bollocks and they just kept writing twists to keep you watching without there being any actual pay-off or logic, when I tried to get through it a few years after it had finished I think I couldn't get beyond series 3 because it was just shit writing, this bared out when he went on to write the total bollocks that was Prometheus.

Sebastian Cobb

I thought it were fucking great, with a slightly too sentimental ending.

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on August 06, 2020, 10:30:34 PM
I thought it were fucking great, with a slightly too sentimental ending.

I thought the sentimentality was offset reasonably well with the
Spoiler alert
wiping from existence of almost every character.
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