It's a very nice look at history via historical retellings. There is really no movie, documentary, book or other media that has this direct a look on history. As it goes along you understand how ideal this storytelling is for this specific story. The book created a hailstorm of different movies and documentaries about this story and in the big documentary about it they for example don't explain how the watch was created so you see them build a huge clock and then suddenly you see them test a mini-watch on a ship. This jump is perplexing. The book has 100 such things that make little sense to an ignorant outsider, so it's very hard to understand what happened and why. In the doc you kinda see what happened, but don't understand how. For that reason this historical mini-series is very much worth a watch and very useful to teach history. The first episode is even fun and engaging overall. The second episode does drag a lot more though. The history is still impressive, but the passing issue becomes too much because the story itself is weak. They often use extremely primitive methods to create tension and excitement and every drama implementation makes the TV show worse. Characters that are supposed to depict high ranking intellectuals scream at each other like angry monkeys in irritating voices. Often dialogue is overly emotional melodrama you typically see in soap operas which of course is irritating instead of engaging. The historical setting still keeps it floating throughout though, but I wish they had cut the 20 or so pointless scenes. The scenes set in the future, for example, have no connection to the creation of the clock. They work in the first episode as they add some emotional appeal by adding in a family life to the story. In the second episode they drag down the story quite a bit as they have no additional emotional story to tell because the sailer is now a divorced loser. This is boring. It's just a guy in an insane asylum which didn't look much different from from the historical screeching monkeys scenes. They really should have kept this story in one single time and then added in some family life there somehow. But overall the melodrama everywhere makes this a hard historical pill to swallow. You'll watch it to see this stuff, but then feel like you kinda could have watched something better.
As cheap historical melodramas focused on real events go this is very much from the higher bracket. While the story overall is too long to be fully engaging the doc is worth a watch for history fanatics. Someone could edit out 50 minutes of it and it would be an overall fun watch I think.
As cheap historical melodramas focused on real events go this is very much from the higher bracket. While the story overall is too long to be fully engaging the doc is worth a watch for history fanatics. Someone could edit out 50 minutes of it and it would be an overall fun watch I think.