Thanks for the feedback
@Zaf. Having not played the games or read the books, I had nothing to base my opinion on other than this series.
Apparently Netflix gave season 2 the green light before the first had aired, they were that confident in it's appeal. Interestingly the credits for each episode lists no less than four different directors - perhaps due to filming in different locations?
To give you an idea, here is the opening cinematic of The Witcher 1
This is kind of the first content we came to know about the Witcher as a western audience. But cinematically, this little animation has better action than when this was addressed in the show. There are clearer visual cues and better story telling. The action also holds up much better; as they know how to use single source lighting and image contrast to actually show what's going on. Compare that with the black armoured dude, fighting a grey skinned beast in a non-lit hallway with a shakey camera, and you start to get an idea where they go wrong.
They do nothing interesting visually really, I mean from a framing and camera movement perspective. Dialogue is handled, as Hitchcock put it, as "photographs of people talking, that bears no relation to the art of the cinema".
The annoying thing is, good editing can save these things,
Star Wars: A New Hope is a classic example of this. If you go look at the final fight scene with the Death Star, in the original script
it wasn't in position to attack the Rebel base (was just hanging around in space where the rebels attack it), that was manufactured in later with editing, and all the dialogue explaining those aspects is dubbed in over screens which don't have actors speaking and use cut footage to fill the blanks. Changes the context and tense atmosphere entirely, because now there is a real consequence to their failure.
Really, only have a lot of scathing comments to make about it. Haven;t even finished watching it because I am finding it intolerably bad.
