True Detective: Night Country
Credit: HBO
As a critic, when it comes to angry fans who strongly disagree with my opinion, I expect a line-up of the usual suspects. These include, but are not limited to:
- If you don’t like it, watch something else (of course, but I’m a professional TV critic…)
- You’re just a hater! (I’m liberal with spelling).
- You did not understand this. (Perhaps!)
- Your opinion is biased. (mhmm)
- You should not go out much. Everyone Say this show/movie/game is great! (Criticism is not a popularity contest, thank God!)
I’m sure I’ll encounter some of these after writing this review of the first episode True Detective: Night Country, A series/season premiere that gave me chills like the dark Alaskan landscape in which the story takes place. Maybe this will be the last. After all, a lot of critics are praising the show. Again, the appeal of popularity never appealed to me.
So far, I’ve only seen the premiere, so I can’t say for sure what will happen in the rest of the six-part season and I may change my mind in the coming weeks, but for now. , , I’m not particularly impressed.
After all these great reviews—“night country This is not a return to form,” Slate said. “It is better.” ,night country So good, it might be even better than Season 1” USA TODAY raves – My expectations were very high. At last, season 1 true Detective One of my favorite seasons of television ever. I was immediately hooked – not after the first episode, but after the first ten minutes of the first episode.
I’m sad to say that I don’t feel that intense excitement night country, Which already seems like a slog in just one episode. The pace may be forgivable – I enjoy slow burns – but the premiere is a mess and its characters are flat and uninteresting.
The actors, led by Jodie Foster as crotchety Ennis, Alaska police detective Liz Danvers, mostly do a very good job. Danvers is similarly grumpy but clearly smart and capable, and it’s fun to see Foster return to a law enforcement role. (If nothing else, I now realize it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the silence of the Lambs,
On the other hand, the story is taking too long to get interesting – it’s a shorter season than usual and many of the limited six episodes are wasted here.
Denver and Detective Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reese) have a history and some bad blood over a cold case involving a dead Native woman, but it’s clear they’re on the hook for this new and almost certainly Will work together to solve the related matter. Scientists, all of whom are men.
Cold Setting is probably my favorite character at the moment. The story begins during the last sunset of the year. Ennis is so far north that there is darkness and change for two months at a stretch. it’s a bleak spin film noir And, like the Gothic Southern swamps and ruins of Season 1, creates a different mood.
Unlike Season 1, that mood isn’t as oppressive or skillfully achieved. While the darkness and cold make for quite an eerie atmosphere, nothing feels more real or lifelike than the sticky creek that Marty Hart and Rust Cohle wade through in search of the Yellow King in Season 1.
Speaking of the Yellow King, season 1 was full of supernatural allusions. The stench of black magic permeated everything. Of course, it wasn’t real. The evil they faced was horrific but all man-made. Whatever ghosts haunted Marty and Rust in their search for the truth, they were never tangible, visible beings. It was enough that his past and the many bodies scattered within it haunted him.
In night country, The supernatural is thrown at us with the precision of a brick. The opening scene features a herd of clearly CGI caribou howling and running headlong over a cliff. The lights flicker. People start going crazy. The moment the sun disappears the water spoils. An old woman follows the ghost of her dead husbands to find their dead bodies in the snow, all frozen due to some kind of rictus terror. When the delivery driver arrives we see some sort of creature (possibly human, but creature-like) running around the science facility.
honestly it feels like yellow jacket But without the same suffocating fear. Even the score and its sinister female chant seem to be taken directly from yellow jacket, Add frozen landscapes and the supernatural and it’s like true Detective Excerpts from the latest season wind river and some pieces yellow jacket And then threw everything together with the buddy cop structure of the first season, only this time with two female detectives instead of two guys. (Even the bear scene looks like it was ripped off the fly yellow jacket,
This makes the whole thing feel more than a little derivative, which in itself wouldn’t bother me if I found the actual story particularly compelling or its characters interesting enough to follow. Those were the two things that made the first season so good. There was a truly fascinating mystery with all kinds of bizarre and horrifying twists, and two cops with vastly different personalities whose tumultuous relationship elevated the show above a typical murder mystery.
We might be getting closer to this with Danvers and Navarro, but so far they seem to dislike each other due to some past disagreement over an old matter. Both of them strike me as tough, impatient, capable women, with very similar personalities. Then again, we’re only one episode in so anything is possible. horror elements of maybe night country Will compensate for its shortcomings.
Although it’s too early to tell, at least right now I’m not that caught up in the mystery or the characters. It’s not bad – and it’s no Season 2, thank God – but both the first episode of Season 1 and the low-rated Season 3 kept me hooked and excited for more. night country I’m just wondering what all the fuss is about. Hopefully things will improve in the second episode.
Scattered Thoughts:
- The opening credits include the hugely popular Billie Eilish song “Bury a Friend”, which I think is appropriate, but not particularly bold or interesting. Compare the opening credits to Season 1, which uses the far more obscure “Far From Any Road” by The Handsome Family. Sorry, it’s still not close – that’s how I feel overall about this season compared to the first. Early days, I know.
- The same applies to music in general. Like the first season of yellow jacket, first season of true Detective Didn’t put too much emphasis on needle drops to understand the issue (or mood). yellow jacket‘ In the second season, every episode was full of 90s songs. in this season true Detective Moving in that direction. we will see.
- I was thinking about the show the killing While watching it, and how great the two spies were in it. I know I’ve complained about this show feeling derivative, but I really think pairing Foster with a younger male detective would have made for a more interesting buddy cop dynamic. I guess I’m just concerned that the show doesn’t have enough contrast between the two tough, serious, angry female detectives. Contrast is key. While Rust and Marty were both white men, they felt more isolated than Denver and Navarro because their personalities were so different. Same with Linden and Holder the killing.
I may add more scattered thoughts after a second viewing. As of now, a lot of ink has been spilled. I’m still waiting for next week’s episode, but I can’t say I’m hooked yet.
Watch my video review below:
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