417. Web-series Reviews – 225

More web-series reviews…

This City is Ours – Came in 2025. Michael, a longtime member of organized crime, falls in love with Diana, prompting him to reevaluate his life and contemplate a future beyond his criminal activities. His newfound love becomes both a motivation and a potential liability.

A review from IMDB...

Scouse Macbeth stapled to Scouse The Godfather, but really good.

I'll cut to the chase: I don't know why so few people have realised it, but this series is a (very loose) adaptation of William Shakespeare's Macbeth. It's so loose that after 8 hours we're basically up to the end of act 2, but it's still Macbeth in spirit. My guess is that the series' creator Stephen Butchard originally wrote an adaptation of Macbeth set in his native Liverpool, but somewhere along the line it got expanded into a whole epic drama about Scouse gangsters and their families.

And you know what? It's all the better for that. Lots of people have done modern adaptations of Shakespeare plots, but mixing them up with really believable modern characters and situations is a lot harder, and We Own This City mostly pulls it off.

Thanks to some unfortunate family connections I've spent some time around the fringes of Liverpool criminals, and this seems pretty true to their weird subculture. My only criticisms would be that the series doesn't fully represent the extreme poverty a lot of Scouse gangsters come from. The reason some of these people will hurt and even kill people for money is that they grew up without any and were exposed to enormous suffering as a result. There are some scenes filmed in poor areas, but the show never really dives into how grim things are for a lot of people. It would really help develop the characters if we saw more of where they came from.

It also sort of underplays the insane drinking culture in Liverpool. A lot of violence happens because people are off their faces much of the time. A couple of characters are criticised for drinking too much, but it's not really explained how normalised the excessive drinking is to a lot of people.

Anyway, this is a really good British gangster drama, and much more realistic and better written than most contributions to the genre. I think I know how it'll all pan out because... I've read Macbeth (duh). But I know that season 2 will be enjoyable whether or not it conforms to my expectations.

My Take – An excellent series...

 

And Then There Were None – Came in 2015. Ten strangers are invited to an isolated island. But as the mismatched group waits for the arrival of the hosts the weather sours and they find themselves cut off from civilization. Very soon, the guests will start to die one by one.

A review from IMDB...

And Then Were None is one of my favourite Agatha Christie books, as well as one of my favourites of all time. The plot is simply ingenious, as well as a contender for Christie's darkest, as is the final solution (left me completely floored on first reading, though it is very difficult to pull off adaptation-wise), there is a suspenseful and ominous atmosphere evoked and the characters are interesting.

This latest adaptation of And Then There Were None is a massive improvement over BBC's previous attempt at adapting Christie (the disappointing Partners in Crime), and of the 7 adaptations it is the third best behind the 1987 Russian(the most faithful) and the 1945 Rene Clair(which had a particularly great cast) versions. Although the 1974 adaptation doesn't have a particularly good reputation- while with major flaws I don't think it's that bad-, the only one that she don't care for is the 1989 version.

While some may find fault with some aspects like the much talked about swearing, gruesome killings and the ending they weren't a problem personally. Some may find the violence and swearing is gratuitous, not me, while the swearing is somewhat anachronistic for Christie it does fit the characters' increasingly fragile states of mind and doesn't feel that out of place within the increasingly dire situation, Aiden Turner's much talked about sex appeal wasn't that much of a distraction either. Speaking of the nature of the killings, a few like Rogers, Blore and to a lesser extent Emily Brent (by far the creepiest murder) were pretty gruesome in method to begin with. Some may also feel the ending too drawn out or rushed (a criticism that is understandable, the ending here doesn't go through a chapter's worth of detail, so it is understandable that people wanted more explanation as to how they were chosen and why the situation happened), while there is a rather drawn out hanging it is incredibly suspenseful, the confrontation between Vera and the murderer is chilling, helped by that the murderer has never been more calm or cold in any other adaptation of this story and that Vera is at her most reprehensible (from memory it is the only adaptation to show that), a good thing as it is implied in the book that she is the most reprehensible of them all. Kudos to the writers for, while not being completely faithful, having a more faithful ending (which would have been difficult as the book's ending works brilliantly as a literary device but poses problems cinematically) than the alternate ending that half the adaptations of the book adopted.

In fact, my only complaints were that some of the crimes of the victims (McArthur's, Rogers and Blore's, whose crimes were so blatant that it was amazing that in the adaptation they didn't cause any suspicion) did go against why the murderer did kill, killing those who may not have been directly responsible for the deaths but were just as culpable, and I really did miss the build up to the death of Emily Brent, that part was one of the most nightmare-inducing of the book and would have been really effective if included.

Other than these criticisms, this adaptation of And Then There Were None was great. It is a fantastic-looking adaptation, with stylish filming and locations and lighting that looked both beautiful and effectively claustrophobic, with the house quite rightly like a character in itself. The music is suitably ominous without being overbearing, and the script has plenty of entertaining and nail-biting parts, following the creepy Nursery rhyme pretty closely (with Blore being the only exception), as well as being intelligently written. Narratively, And Then There Were None does start off a little on the slow side, but after the dinner scene it becomes captivatingly gripping, with a genuine sense of claustrophobic dread, up to the end credits. Some may find in the third episode that the drunk scene was out of place, for me while not in the book, it certainly did fit the idea of it being the remaining characters' last night and that they knew it. Which was actually one of the remarkable things about this adaptation, that as well as being a mystery it was a psychological character study too, something that not every adaptation did. What was also fun about this adaptation was having friends and family not familiar with the story, and hearing them trying to work out aloud who the murderer was and seeing them visibly taken aback at the real murderer's identity (this viewer can relate, being the same when first reading the book).

And Then There Were None, lastly, has a great cast, consisting of talented actors. This is particularly true with Charles Dance, who has a cold but understated authority, Aiden Turner, who has more than just sex appeal having also broodiness (my friends were convinced it was him, Armstrong or Vera responsible for a while), and Burn Gorman, who had a menacing but also nervous intensity. Maeve Dermody is also deserving of credit for bringing some vulnerability to Vera but also steel, and it was great to see Vera show her true colours at the end which we didn't get to see enough of in other adaptations that adopted the alternate ending. Miranda Richardson's Emily Brent is a character we feel repulsion and pity for, and while Toby Stephens may seem like he's overacting occasionally again it is perfectly fitting with Armstrong's state of mind. Douglas Booth is young, handsome and somewhat annoying, but really that's essentially what the role calls for (the only thing that's missing that was there in the other versions is a rendition of the frighteningly omnipresent poem). Sam Neill is solid as are Anna Maxwell Martin and Noah Taylor, though with comparatively little to do.

To conclude, has some imperfections here and there but still one of the better adaptations of one of Christie's masterpieces. 9/10 Bethany Cox

My Take – An excellent series...

 

A Tragedy Foretold: Flight 3054 – Came in 2025. The 2007 Congonhas Airport crash in São Paulo killed 199 people and transformed Brazilian aviation. The accident's consequences continue to influence air travel safety in Brazil.

A review from IMDB...

Watching A Tragedy Foretold Flight 3054 left me frustrated, not because of the tragedy itself which was undeniably heartbreaking but because of how the documentary tried to frame the causes of the crash and the people they chose to villainize. The core of the issue was simple: pilot error. The main pilot failed to pull one of the levers back as required under the updated procedures. He used an outdated method, and that critical mistake led to the crash. It wasn't the lack of grooves on the pavement, it wasn't the rain which was below dangerous levels, and it wasn't airport overcrowding. Those were all distractions from the actual point. Even the fact that there were two pilots instead of a traditional captain and co-pilot setup isn't relevant because both pilots were trained the same. You can adapt to using the left hand for the throttle pilots are professionals, not amateurs. There's even footage of another plane landing safely just before Flight 3054, showing that the runway condition wasn't the deciding factor.

What bothered me most was how the documentary treated Denise Abreu. It felt like a deliberate attempt to make her look guilty or indifferent, when in reality, she wasn't even a central figure in the crash. She was the vice president of ANAC, not the president, and had no direct role in flight operations. Yet the filmmakers inserted scenes of her smoking a cigar and attending events, trying to paint her as cold or uncaring, without any actual proof she was indifferent to the tragedy. The female reporter who pushed that image came across as biased, even bitter, and her claim that Denise told her she didn't care about the victims felt like a lie-especially since it was only her word and no evidence supported it. People in high positions don't always come from the industry they regulate; that's what experts and advisors are for. That criticism of Denise's qualifications was just petty and misleading.

The documentary also failed by focusing its legal and emotional outrage in the wrong places. Instead of going after the airline or the company that made the throttle system entities that might actually hold some responsibility-the victims' lawyers decided to sue three people with very little direct involvement. The reasoning? Because "big corporations always get away with it," so they went after "smaller fish." That logic is not only cowardly, it's also unjust. The three people on trial were ultimately acquitted, and rightly so. They were scapegoats in a legal strategy designed to provide closure, not accountability.

Even some of the victims' families came off as overly entitled in their anger, especially Dario Scott and Robert Gomez. I understand grief can make people irrational, but blaming the wrong people helps no one. In contrast, Christophe Haddad stood out as the most fair and reasonable voice. He's a pilot or something, so he knows the technical side, and he managed to stay level-headed. Still, even he lost me a bit when criticizing Marco Antonio Bologna for taking a helicopter to the hotel and having bodyguards in the press conference when talking to the families. That made perfect sense you don't walk into a crowd of grieving, angry people without protection when your airline is at the center of the disaster.

The worst part of the documentary was the clear effort to manipulate the viewer's emotions especially with Denise Abreu. After she resigned from ANAC, they immediately cut to news clips about her failed political run or what ever, a separate scandal, and even a random unrelated death, as if to build a case against her character without any real evidence. They never did this to Marco or the others who were acquitted. Why only her? It was unfair, clearly biased editing, and it made the whole documentary feel more like a hit piece than an objective account of what happened.

In the end, this documentary didn't present a tragedy with clarity and honesty. It presented a story warped by misdirected blame, emotional manipulation, and selective outrage. The crash was a result of human error. That's tragic enough. We don't need a villain who didn't cause the crash just to make the story more dramatic.

My Take – An excellent watch!

Adios till next time😊!!