2 out of 5

Developed by: Guillaume Lubrano

Covers season 1

This is one of those few times where I’m going to allot some extra starrage for the intentions, and not so much the final product.  Because there are some things that are so awesome about the gist of ‘Métal Hurlant Chronicles’: I love that it’s a half hour.  In an era of bloated 45-60 minute shows, ten to thirteen episode seasons, shot on movie budgets with big name stars, we get some padding.  Sometimes we get a lot of padding.  And sometimes we say that X Y or Z is a great episode when there’s actually some subplot clutter stuffed in there that we ignore.  MH is a big concept with, I would think, a wealth of material to draw from, so the possibility would certainly be there to stretch it out to 60 minutes, even if that meant 2 segments per episode.  But instead it’s kept to a compact half hour, which makes the relative… erm… disappointment of the show easier to get over, and thus, on the flipside, easier to appreciate the positives.  I love that they chose the screaming chunk of planet as a framing device and did it right in that it rarely directly interacts with the story.  (And I’m glad as shit that they didn’t actually make it screaming.)  Even though the campy / cheap production qualities scream ‘ScyFy’, the low-budget look is actually somewhat charming.  I wouldn’t complain if they had the money to full realize these sequences, but I appreciate that they pitched the ‘look’ pretty consistently over the series, so nothing sticks out as being so much greater than anything else.  It’s all a little staged looking, and this does complement the sorta other-worldly vibe that the comic gives off.  I love that they mention each issue that they got the story from.  I love that they incorporated the majority of the dialogue from each issue, as well as key shots.

So there’s a lotta love from me because there’s a lotta love for the comic.  And I do appreciate that.  It feels legitimate, and the developer / producers did further right by trying to mix some genre stars in there.

But, ahem, that can only take you so far.

The main killer of the show is the general tone.  There’s a great opening theme from video game guy Jesper Kyd that kicks things off promisingly, matching some enticingly chintzy visuals in the titles, and then the music primarily disappears for the entire remaining runtime, except perhaps for some incredibly minor touches here and there.  This wouldn’t be too noticeable if almost all of the dialogue wasn’t delivered with Dryer-like panache (i.e. COMPLETELY BEREFT OF ANY EMOTION AND AT A SNAIL’S PACE)  and the camera unmoving from setup shot to setup shot (perhaps to emulate panel-by-panel?).  And then add to this the mixed French / American production, which means American actors with foreign directors, and foreign actors trying to affect American accents, and you’ve got six episodes of script that rarely sounds natural.

The second killer is taking the adaptation a bit too far.  Last minute reveals are nothing new to TV, and a lot of Metal Hurlant’s 1-shot tales inevitably rely on a final change of perspective or twist, but you can build things up a bit differently in a ‘static’ visual medium – meaning the pace is set by the reader, assisted by the artist – versus television, which is going to force you to experience things as they’re delivered.  Bear in mind these are generally 2-5 page stories.  So although I praised the 30 minute format, even that might be a bit of a stretch: in some instances to fill the runtime, or in some instances to remain faithful to details mentioned in the comic, episodes spend a lot of time showing us things in a way that ends up being completely unimportant and irrelevant.  This is world-building in the comic, but misleading as a moving picture.  If you’re unfamiliar with the source material, when the final huzzah is revealed in each ep, you’d be right to wonder why we spent minutes on pointless conversations that didn’t really add to anything.

That’s only two killers vs. a ton of love, but those killers affect everything.  Womp.

As a final curiosity, the original MH series ran for 133 issues, the second one only for 14.  All of these stories were culled from the second volume.  I would have thought they would have started with the older material, as there’s a ton more to draw from, but perhaps there are some rights limitations there I’m not aware of.  Or maybe the issues are just hard to get ahold of.  I dunno.  It’s also weird that they reference the numbering on the second volume as thought it continues after issue #133 (i.e. “published in Metal Hurlant # 142″… which corresponds to volume 2 #9), which even the series publisher’s website (and the comics indicia) don’t do.  So: ?

The end.