My daughter and I both recently finished reading All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, and we both loved it. She was reading it for school and kept saying I just had to read it, so I did, and we have had some wonderful discussions about it along the way. It is a great book, very beautifully written, heart-wrenching story, and it left us both feeling a bit melancholy at the end. The Pulitzer Prize it won is well-deserved. So, loving it as we did, we thought we'd try watching the miniseries Netflix recently released.
My advice if you loved the book: DO NOT BOTHER with the Netflix travesty.
My advice if you haven't read the book yet: Read the book, skip the Netflix mess.
It's too bad, really, because the casting for the miniseries was excellent, but the screenwriting for the adaptation was terrible, in my opinion. I understand that movie adaptations are difficult and they will necessarily have to leave some things out. But this was just quite bad. The book does a wonderful job going back and forth between flashbacks and the present day of the story to let the reader understand the characters and learn important plot reveals slowly and at the appropriate time to make for a beautiful, heartbreaking story. The miniseries changes important plot points and reveals things much too early that you didn't read until well into the book, such that in the miniseries they just don't make any sense without the background build up, and if you hadn't read the book, I'm not sure you'd even know what was going on or why it was all that significant. It just ends up being a confusing mess, and you don't really feel much of anything for the characters, whereas, in the book, you grow to love and understand them. Werner's character is especially flat in the miniseries, and that is just inexcusable. His character growth arc is one of THE major significant points of the book, and by episode 3, I am not seeing ANYTHING about him yet that hints that the show will be getting any better. Granted, we've only made it to episode 3, but I hate it enough that I just don't care. I am done with it. If it hasn't been able to win me over by this point, well, life is just too short to waste any more time on it, in my opinion.
Read the book. It is very much worth the time spent. The miniseries is really just NOT. And that is a shame.
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