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Sarah (7800 KP) rated Fortitude - Season 1 in TV

Dec 9, 2018

Fortitude - Season 1

2015 | Drama, Mystery, Thriller

8.8

(6 Ratings)

TV Season Rating

A genre-spanning atmospheric thriller

I watched Fortitude when it first aired a few years ago, and have decided to give it another watch now to refresh my memory now the final series has aired.

Fortitude is set in a beautiful location in the arctic, and the show really makes the most of showing off this location as often as possible. The plot itself is intriguing and bonkers, but yet doesn't quite go too far. It spans a verify of genres, from murder mystery and crime to drama and gory horror, and it does this really well. Some of the gory horror parts are actually quite disturbing (in an good). This is also a very character driven story, and most of the characters in this are well rounded and developed. It has a fantastic cast including some very well known faces like Stanley Tucci and Michael Gambon. However for me it's Richard Dormer that truly shines in this. He gives Dan a lot of depth and despite his errant and sometime psychotic ways, you do still feel sorry for him. I find it difficult to accept that this is the same person who plays Beric Dondarrion in GoT, he's that good an actor.

If you're looking for something that's well acted, doesn't stick to a specific genre and is honestly a little bizarre and unusual, then this is definitely worth a watch.

Kudos

Ross (3284 KP) rated The Snowman (2017) in Movies

Jul 17, 2018 (Updated Jul 17, 2018)

The Snowman (2017)

2017 | Crime, Drama, Horror

4.9

(32 Ratings)

Movie Rating

Style over substance

Contains spoilers, click to show

This film is aptly titled - like when making a snowman I got bored 10 minutes in and just wanted it all to melt away.
The film seems like a stylish director's first attempt at the crime/thriller genre: a genre where details matter, the plot has to build up and unravel at a certain pace, with clever twists and turns along the way. Here there is none of that, there is a feeble attempt to suggest some disappearances are linked but no revelation that the snowmen were present at all scenes (a pretty key element of the whole plot). The film is just a series of things happening, in very nice, slow, moody, atmospheric scenes, and then the plot is crammed into the last 5 minutes at pretty frantic pace. And once its revealed it really makes no sense. We haven't been given enough of the key details along the way to try to empathise with the killer or at least understand why he did what he did.
The characters are all totally disposable. A cheeky spoiler: if a character seems like a creepy killer but has no apparent link to the case - he is the killer.
And I know Val Kilmer was recovering from throat cancer surgery so couldn't speak, but the voice dubbing was so badly executed that all of his scenes were just farcical and should not have made the final cut (they added literally nothing to the overall plot!).

Kudos

Sarah (7800 KP) Jul 17, 2018

Whilst the book isn’t perfect, the film would’ve been a lot better had they at least tried to stick closer to the actual story!

Kudos

Ross (3284 KP) Jul 18, 2018

I haven't read the Snowman but have read a few of the Harry Hole books and would indeed expect the plot in the book to be a lot better than this. It feels like they cherry-picked bits of it, and the plot of a crime thriller is often so intertwined that you can't remove one thread without the whole thing rattling down.

Kudos