Brief Story Line
Ever since she was a kid, Clare Abshire (Rose Leslie - Death on the Nile, The Good Fight TV series etc) had been in love with a time traveller named Henry DeTamble (Theo James - Underworld: Blood Wars, The Divergent Series: Allegiant etc) who often came to visit her for a short period of time.
Henry himself was actually having a genetic disorder that could make him unintentionally travel through time without any control of when and where. Obviously this proved to be a big challenge in Henry's life which made him never think about the future. That was until he was 28 years old and met with Clare for the very first time who claimed to have known him all her life.
So what would happen to Clare and Henry? You can find out in this series.
End of Brief Story Line
This series was based on the 2003 novel of the same title written by Audrey Niffenegger which has been adapted into a movie starring Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana as Clare and Henry respectively. Now I have not read the novel at all, but that 2009 movie somehow felt it was a complete adaptation as it gave closure to their love story. What I felt sad now is that I read this series adaptation had been cancelled after 1 season, which gutted me as I would not be able to see the conclusion to this version.
Even though this is sort of like a remake of the movie, I was still interested in watching the new Clare and Henry as they went through their ordeal. Being a 6 episodes series, the good thing was we were given more time to see how they developed their relationship and it also gave a realistic feeling (in particular the part where Clare found that young Henry was different from the one she made earlier). However, there was one aspect that I did not really like, which was the way Clare and Henry seemed to be answering questions during interview in front of a camera.
During the whole season, we were shown the many occurrences of Henry travelled to various time and location bare naked and had to find ways to survive, which was sometime fun but also sad. The time travel aspect itself defied some standard "rule" in so many other movies/series, such as you should/could not meet yourself or the useless attempt of changing the past. So people who have been accustomed to the usual time travel element might feel the difference to be too significant. For me though, since I know this is a romance sci-fi genre, I could understand that the time travel was important but the romance that resulted from it was more important. Consequently I was not too bothered by this non-customary time travel.
Personally to me Rose Leslie and Theo James were charming and their full of love expressions seemed really genuine, which made it convincing to see that they were in love. The wigs though were definitely not the best as they looked bad and too obvious, although the makeup were quite OK. Oh, the actors & actresses who played the young Clare & Henry were amazing. Their similarities were quite uncanny and I thought they looked like the real young version, especially Everleigh McDonnel as 6 year old Clare and Brian Altemus as teen Henry. In addition to the two main leads, there were some important support cast too such as Desmin Borges (You're the Worst TV series etc) as Gomez, Natasha Lopez as Charisse, Josh Stamberg (Drop Dead Diva TV series etc) as Henry's father Richard and few others.
Btw, the whole series was directed by Davit Nutter who frequently directed pilot series such as Roswell, Smallville, The Mentalist, Arrow and many more. It was written by Steven Moffat (prior works including Doctor Who and Sherlock). Hence it was surprising with such experienced names that this one failed to impress the critics. It might also be the reason for the series cancellation after only 1 season.
Overall to me this was an interesting and quite lovely romance series that resulted from time travel. It was fun to watch Henry and Clare trying to get to know the different version of themselves through various time lines. The series also felt fresh and generally has a bright tone, except maybe episode 3 which was combination of light and dark. My favorite was the 2nd episode, while the final episode was great too (it has a brief mid end credit scene which I think was supposed to be the bridge for second season). So if you like romance combined with time travel, and you are OK not to see the real ending, then you should be able to like this one. But if your preference is on the sci-fi element, then this might not be to your liking.
Mike's movie moments rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
No comments:
Post a Comment