Category: Reviews

As we close up another week together on Planet Earth, I thought you might like to hear about dramatic Netflix productions highlighting two of the worst things that ever happened on our shared planet: (1) the Holocaust, and (2) the asteroid collision that caused the extinction of almost all of the dinosaurs.

Nuremburg (Netflix)

A two-and-a-half-hour movie starring Russell Crowe as the Nazi second-in-command and war criminal Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, and Rami Malek as the US Army psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, tasked with analyzing him to confirm he would be fit to stand trial at the Nuremburg Trials.

It was educational and heartbreaking. Despite the hype around Crowe’s performance implying otherwise, the story is Dr. Kelley’s. In order to get Goering to trust him, Kelley spent thousands of hours interviewing him, finding ways to connect and empathize with him – arguably one of the most evil persons in the history of mankind.

All of the acting was outstanding. But even more important was the educational element. I especially appreciated the cuts to actual footage from the Nuremburg Trials, demonstrating that they had staged it accurately.

The educational element may have slowed down the story a bit, especially given its length, so Wiki’s classification as a “psychological thriller historical drama film” may be a little generous. It’s definitely the second half of that description.

Our household rating: 👍👍👍👍🐾🐾🐾🐾

The Dinosaurs (Netflix)

A 4-episode docuseries narrated by Morgan Freeman. Do you even need more than that? How about “produced by Stephen Spielberg”?

So, this series was visually stunning. The live-footage landscapes were breathtaking. The CGI elements, other than the dinosaurs and their contemporaries, included Flora, representations of major extinction-level Earth events, and a neat signal of the passage of time where the episodes used different “camera angle” (not a real camera, lol) strategies to imply that the Earth was spinning at warp speed.

It was also incredibly educational and engaging. For comparison, I love David Attenborough nature documentaries, but I can zone them out and focus on, say, writing a blog post with it playing in the background. Freeman’s voice is no less soothing than Attenborough’s, but the content was so interesting that I had a hard time looking away from the screen.

👍👍👍👍🐾🐾🐾🐾 Another 4-thumbs-8-paws-up rating from us. The doggies would have raised more paws if they had them.

We highly recommend both.

Keith and I binged all 8 episodes of 56 Days on Prime Video over the weekend. I reviewed the series below.

56 Days: The Good

On the plus side, I found the storytelling in 56 Days gripping. We wanted to watch more episodes on Saturday, bedtime be damned, but enough episodes remained to convince our practical side to wait. The key driver of tension is not actually whodunnit so much as… who died? Sooo many red herrings, twists and reveals in that department.

The story follows the lives of both the suspects and the investigators. Not a single character in the story held the moral high ground. Everyone harbored major flaws. But some characters demonstrated outright malicious behavior.

Karma is a bitch, though.

56 Days: The Less Good

Now for the negatives. The story features a new relationship between Oliver and Ciara. That relationship ultimately results in a murder mystery. The two characters keep secrets from each other. One secretely planned the “relationship” in advance. But the characters legitimately fall in love.

Supposedly.

I didn’t see it, or at least, not enough. Eroticism – which seemed like a primary goal of the producers – pre-empted the emotional relationship and its development. The erotic scenes were just that – erotic – and did little to drive the plot or develop the characters or their relationship.

It’s also possible that the storytellers struggled to convey the relationship without sharing all the facts about the characters sooner. The show is a mystery first and foremost, so we were uninformed about certain things in the histories of these characters. Had I known the histories while watching the relationship blossom, I might have been more convinced.

Overall, I’d probably give the series a 7/10.

Literarily,
Michelle