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Elite Fan
Joined: Sep 2008
Posts: 40,122
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I don't have a ton of time right now to look through all the mentions of Shadowplay to see if they're reviews are not, just because they obviously are written in German and I can't tell right away if it's just an article about the show or an actual review.
Mans did post this review which gave Shadowplay 8/10:
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"Schatten der Murderer - Shadowplay" is a series that combines the turmoil, the search for justice and the political power games in the post-war period into a complex story. Thanks to a great ensemble, a detailed staging and a good script, written by Måns Mårlind, exciting television entertainment is achieved here, the themes and characters of which are not only to be understood in the context of contemporary history, but also repeatedly refer to today's networking of politics and the private sphere.
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https://www.film-rezensionen.de/2020...er-shadowplay/
Another review that only gives it 2.5/5 but blame some of the problems with it on the dubbing of the show in German, etc. They also only viewed the first double episode.
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"Shadow of the Murderers - Shadowplay": serial killer thriller with Taylor Kitsch and Nina Hoss and too many platitudes - review
So it was a good idea what the Swedish "The Bridge" -Co-author Måns Mårlind has come up as: a blend of history panorama, melodrama and mystery thriller, located in the hot summer of 1946 in Berlin, the ruins and rubble mountains also one year after the Second World War and the end of the National Socialist dictatorship determine the cityscape. Mårlind himself staged the eight episodes (which ZDF shows in a double pack on four evenings) with his long-time director partner Björn Stein , with whom he has already worked on the series "Midnight Sun" and "Underworld Awakening"turned. One thing is immediately noticeable about the staging: There is no dark, monochrome post-war scenario to be seen here. The shown Berlin, although in ruins, is not the desolate Berlin that one knows from black and white photos, on the contrary, during the day the summer sun dominates, the colorful clothes of strolling women. The Australian film “Lore” staged the post-war period with such a sunny color scheme - a good contrast to the hunger and chaos abysses of that time.
It was to this Berlin that US cop Max McLaughlin traveled to the beginning, with a leather jacket, suspenders, fluff and a well-styled unshaven out-of-bed look played by the Canadian star Taylor Kitsch ( “Friday Night Lights” , “John Carter - Between Two Worlds "). Kitsch himself also acted as the producer of this star studded Canadian-German co-production (which was filmed in Prague, like so many productions set in the European past). McLaughlin had a German mother, grew up the son of a police officer in Brooklyn and went to the police himself - now he is supposed to build something like a functional police unit in Berlin, which has been destroyed and divided into four sectors, while at the same time he hopes to help his brother, who was missing in the war, one Soldiers to find.
In Schöneberg, part of the US sector, he meets immediately to the patents main Commissioner and studied Semiologin Elsie garden ( Nina Hoss ), the unit made up by women (including Lena Dörrie from "LaBaule & Heirs" ) and young people (including Maximilian Ehrenreich from "Ella Schön" as the Jewish son of parents deported to Auschwitz) exists - armed not with pistols, but with chair legs. The troop is called scarecrows .
McLaughlin has barely arrived in Berlin, where rubble women wearing headscarves are doing their work on every corner (in front of "Berlin builds up" banners), where freshly cleaned aircraft bombs are lying around and bullet holes allow picturesque backlighting, where taxi drivers advertise the most immoral temptations ( for a can of beans you'll get a Polish virgin! ), it's already going well: First, Russians maraud through the city, which is considered the “crime capital of the world” due to the destroyed infrastructure. The nasty creaking general from the Soviet sector warns Max with a disdainful look: The war is not over, only entered a new phase! Then Max comes across the sarcastic US Vice Consul Tom Franklin (with mustache and bulldog:"Dexter" Michael C. Hall ), who resides in a Zehlendorf villa in the countryside and entrusts the cop with his sexually active British wife Claire ( Tuppence Middleton , "Sense8" ) - who of course turns his head.
Soon there will be the next victims in the form of cruelly slain GIs: As the audience learns well before Max and Elsie, criminal king Gladow ( Sebastian Koch , “The Lives of Others” ) is behind it. The so-called "Engelmacher", a gynecologist, offers desperate women who have become pregnant as a result of rape a free abortion in the British sector, but then ties them to his underground organization and forces them to prostitution, drug trafficking and murder. One of them is the disaffected Marianne ( Anne Ratte-Polle , “The spoken word counts” ), another is the young Karin (great: Mala Emde from “And tomorrow the whole world”), the example of which is to spell out the change from the innocently distressed waitress to the morally free murdering young goup: Even her cat keeps a distance from her.
Finally, Max's older brother Moritz ( Logan Marshall-Green from "Code name Quarry" ) emerges from the semi-darkness like Colonel Kurtz once in "Apocalypse Now" . Max shares a bad childhood trauma with Moritz, now Moritz is on an “Inglourious Basterds” -like revenge trip against Hitler's surviving henchmen: Max is supposed to settle an old debt and help his brother to “pull out the Nazi weeds”.
Excuse me: Max and Moritz? Yes indeed. Mårlind refers explicitly to Wilhelm Busch's famous picture story from 1865, even allowing the drawings to waft through the opening credits in a mystery-heavy manner. Allegedly the mother of the McLaughlin brothers was a fan of this famous "boy story", now Moritz is taking the seven nasty pranks of the early comic heroes as a model for his bloody revenge: Already in the first double episode, a Nazi family dangles from the wooden beam like the four unfortunate ones Widow Bolte's chickens in the apple tree.
This was the first trick, and the second follows immediately : The well-known Busch's rhyme as a transition from sequence to sequence naturally fits perfectly with the serial narrative principle of a multi-part, and the idea of playing thriller motifs à la David Fincher's “Seven” in front of a historical setting Leaving it is, if not brand new, at least appealing. As an investigative duo, Max and Elsie are a sufficiently opposing odd couple , whose jerking could provide good buddy movie moments: as a shirt-sleeved analyst with a subliminal fear of the return of her possibly war-disabled husband ( Benjamin Sadlerplays him, but does not appear at the beginning), he as a film noir investigator who left his ten-year-old son behind in New York. Of the two relationships with women that Max enters into, the buddy with colleague Elsie and the erotically charged one with Claire, the former is clearly more interesting. The interspersed short scenes in which the protagonists can be seen speaking solo directly into the camera and providing information are also exciting: Who is their speech aimed at? From what situation is this spoken?
Unfortunately, these are almost the only formally outstanding moments in "Shadows of the Murderers - Shadowplay" . Otherwise, the entertaining production adheres all too slavishly to the usual requirements of formatted narrative television: a golden, warming light that is almost typical for ZDF covers the scenery both at night and during the day, the CGI ruins look like from a "Terra X "-Follow beamed over, and whenever the audience could figure out what they saw, the montage helps with sometimes annoying flashbacks, the sentimental string soundtrack helps with the emotional classification. There is little difference from conventional history films from the evening program, and even if Mårlind speaks a lot about the desired authenticity in interviews (a dubious fetish anyway), his images seem to emulate the aesthetics of conventional history television films rather than design an independent look to want. What also applies to the tendency of the episodes to be too clear: When neglected street children appear, they are decorated with dirty faces, as if they had just crawled out of a bomb crater;Give me four years and you will not recognize Germany again . and while the Americans at best carry Spleens to the market (like Franklin), the Russians and their Stasi-like informers are drawn like cliché figures from Cold War rumors - originally with a Stalin poster on the wall, a samovar on the desk and a vodka bottle at night Intrigue talk.
This boldness also touches on another problem that is still far too little talked about: the synchronization of such international co-productions, which from the station's point of view always has no alternative, and the inconsistency that emerges. As great as the cast of six casters is seen individually ( Martin Wuttke and Lena Urzendowsky are also from Germanywith succinct brief appearances), so little does it fit together overall. Nina Hoss, Mala Emde and Anne Ratte-Polle were, although not Berlin women, condemned to unrestrained Berliners, which was sometimes more, sometimes less convincing. Taylor Kitsch, Michael C. Hall and Logan Marshall-Green, on the other hand, are dubbed by pithy speakers in accent-free German. They only speak German, even when the Americans speak to each other. Although Max's mother of German origin is supposed to certify that he can speak and understand German, he doesn't speak like an American in Berlin, but like a professional German speaker. The Russians, on the other hand, all speak with an accent and, on top of that, when they are among themselves, Russian (with subtitles). Why this seemingly arbitrary approach? Clear case: The “foreign” part of the Russians can be linguistically marked, while the American characters should speak in the same language as their German colleagues (and, more importantly, like the ZDF audience listening). In the streaming age of internationally fluctuating series of different language origins, all of this not only seems out of date, it also destroys a lot in terms of content, because it irons out the multilingualism and polyphony of the occupied city of Berlin: when the American Max meets the British Claire and the dialogue is about the differences between these origins, especially in relation to the Germans, but both characters speak the same impeccable voice-over German, the scene is taken ad absurdum. Added to this is the artificial sound track that keeps a distance, because large parts had to be re-dubbed for this procedure - one is almost shocked when suddenly a scene appears in which Sebastian Koch and Mala Emde can be heard in the original sound. You can immediately see how much livelier, more intense it comes across compared to the many scenes in which Taylor Kitsch sneaks through the ruins with the German voice of a manly hardboiled gangster hunter.
Certainly, these points of criticism may be superfluous if the original version should ever be available on home media - but they are valid for the form of broadcast.
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https://www.fernsehserien.de/news/tv...l-plattitueden |
