Thoughts on "The Essex Serpent"
Dec. 18th, 2022 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
goatgodschildI want to get some editing software and make a fan edit of this thing, because The Essex Serpent has a perfectly good two-and-a-half hour (or less!) film in it, but it's padded to all ends. Not in the "MST3K" type of padding, where every shot is taken slightly longer than it needs to be, dull, ham-faced men dully repeat everything they can, and stock footage is added on to fill in where that last can't. Instead, it's the "prestige drama" type of padding, where plots are added on for the sake of adding on plots, and absolutely no more than two people can talk to each other at once, meaning that any significant news can be stretched to two hours.
The show is set in the 1860's, but the hair/costumes/dialogue is all over the place. More than Midsommar, it feels like a natural outgrowth of 1970's folk horror/Hammer horror, where historical accuracy takes a backseat to:
- whatever "old timey" costumes the production had on hand that week
- affording one actual star
Which means that you end up with films like The Blood on Satan's Claw, where one of the main characters, a peasant boy of the 18th century, has a perm. In that same vein, I'm enjoying the trend of increasingly colorblind casting in historical dramas as well. Like "we need a stuffy, old-timer politician", and "we need a medical student who's good-hearted, but a bit of a dandy" are played by people of color for no more reason than that the actors showed up and fit the part.
Speaking of parts, I don't like Tom Hiddleston's character as much as I wanted to. He just sounds and acts way too Eton, for a story set in the sticks. He can be a lot louder and weirder, but he isn't, here -- which means I'm left baffled at why his character is where he is.
The show is set in the 1860's, but the hair/costumes/dialogue is all over the place. More than Midsommar, it feels like a natural outgrowth of 1970's folk horror/Hammer horror, where historical accuracy takes a backseat to:
- whatever "old timey" costumes the production had on hand that week
- affording one actual star
Which means that you end up with films like The Blood on Satan's Claw, where one of the main characters, a peasant boy of the 18th century, has a perm. In that same vein, I'm enjoying the trend of increasingly colorblind casting in historical dramas as well. Like "we need a stuffy, old-timer politician", and "we need a medical student who's good-hearted, but a bit of a dandy" are played by people of color for no more reason than that the actors showed up and fit the part.
Speaking of parts, I don't like Tom Hiddleston's character as much as I wanted to. He just sounds and acts way too Eton, for a story set in the sticks. He can be a lot louder and weirder, but he isn't, here -- which means I'm left baffled at why his character is where he is.
