2 out of 5

Director: Christopher Smith

Totally not my idea of a good time, I’ll admit to only checking this television mini-series out because of director Christopher Smith.  And perhaps totally not his idea of something he’d normally want to direct, but someone saw his Black Death and figured he’d be a good pick.  Smith’s eye for staging scenes is certainly at work, as the camera weaves characters through fore, mid, and background very clearly and seamlessly, and large tableau’s of castles and fields are knit together in a fashion where they feel like they inhabit real space.  But the best-selling book that earned this adaptation causes the script to suffer from mundane best-sellerism, where the bad guys are predictably super bad and the romances are predictably tragic, and then the for-whatever-reason involvement of the Scott brothers (was this Tony’s last work?) as executive producers gives the whole thing the boring Robin Hood makeover, where accuracy of setting seems so important as to translate how slowly things must’ve happened back in those days.

Is all of this guesswork?  Absolutely.  Maybe the Scott’s held back, maybe Smith secretly harbored over the script for days.  Who knows.  Regardless, we end up with a 3-hour 2-part TV thing that starts interestingly with time-period switching and conspiracy noodling but then never satisfyingly ties any of these themes together until our very last sequence, when we’re well beyond caring.

Archaeological dig in present day.  A chick wanders into a cave, sees a labyrinth and a ring and some skeletons and has a vision of a woman from eras past, handing her a book.  Then she passes out.  When she comes to, she’s being questioned about the ring by some guys in black suits.  But there is no ring!  Goodness!  Did she pocket it?  Did someone else take it?  In traditional film pacing, we would pan to where the ring is nestled in the grass, or show our lead palming the ring or some clue.  But no, we don’t know where it is, or why it’s important, but she does have another item on her she hid… a bracelet.  Did we… do we care about the bracelet?  Wait, now its the 1200s, and fer fuck’s sake the Cathars are about to be persecuted by The Pope’s army, that bastard.  Is one of these girls the woman from the flashback?  Maybe?

Had enough?  Labyrinths are good film fodder – they are, verily, a maze, and so hint at a similarly twisty plot, or dead ends that turn us around and cause us to thoughtfully retrace…  Our black-suited questioners (or one of them) are nicely mysterious, and a creepy phone call is placed to pique our interest that much more about Their Agenda.  And it’s television, so we (I) can excuse some padding to the pacing to establish more characters and plotlines than we might see in a focused film.  But after 30 minutes, after 1 hour, we still haven’t really gotten back around to a point.  More ingredients are thrown into the pot… about the hunt for some books that tell the location of the grail, this hunt taking place both in the 1200s and modern times, but it never quite directly connects the storylines in the way that dream sequence does in the beginning, so we’re stuck trusting that all of this will matter in some way…

The moral, and perhaps the book, seem to take the Da Vinci Code religious conspiracy and de-religion it, making it less about a conspiracy and more about how such things affect our lives.  It’s an interesting pitch, and the special hints at a scope of that moral that never quite comes across on the screen, but there seems to be some confusion as to what we’re watching – a thriller, a drama, a period piece.  Smith throws in some nice pastiches in battle sequences, or moments of quiet introspection, but his grasp on where to take it wanders as well, and it seems sometimes that we’re just walking with a camera and listening to the script.  There was patience put into the production, and there was an overall point behind the whole affair, hence my allotting an extra star way up there, but this is otherwise such mundane flotsam that I can only hope the book makes more to-do about labyrinths or conspiracies or that moral, and that there will be an understandable reason that Ridley Scott wanted to movie-ize this, beyond his obsession with people with ratty hair in long, somewhat boring movies OH WAIT MAYBE THAT’S THE REASON