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Reviews
1899 (2022)
Excellent production, very mediocre script
Nice suspense and cliffhangers paired with a mysterious story that clears up. Puzzle piece by puzzle piece. However at the end the final impression is confusion. It is however not a fantasy challenging confusion, it's a disappointing one. Too much open ends. After only half of the puzzle is solved a completely new puzzle is started in the last 5 minutes. Looks like the author dropped the pen when he reached the minimum number of required pages to be delivered.
I can recommend it for the outstanding performance of actors and the digital crew, but only if you can live with a story that ends abruptly and incomplete.
Marco Polo (2014)
Good remake
It is indeed a good remake of 1982 original Marco Polo mini-series. Ken Marshall and Lorenzo Richelmy even look alike. We get to see more sex and maybe a bit more realistic bleeding wounds but the screenplay stays very close to the original version so far. That is great in my opinion, because the story does not need to be revamped. Re-filming with 30 years newer technology however makes this mini-series so much more pleasant to watch on a big screen. It is unfortunate that original locations were not used much, but filming in China is not that easy I would guess. Nonetheless it is overwhelming to relive and see what was on the side of the silk road, what Mongolia and China were, how rich their culture was developed in contrast to the European culture or the Indian tribes on the American continent.