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Netflix Highlights: Babylon Berlin and Outlaw King


Netflix Highlights: Babylon Berlin, Outlaw King
  Babylon Berlin
            Netflix has some truly amazing content.  Let me highly recommend this German dramatic series set in 1929 that is the most expensive non-English language series ever made. There is a great deal more information about it available online through the official website https://www.babylon-berlin.com/en/overview-babylon/ and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_Berlin. Despite a very busy volunteer schedule I’ve managed to view all 16 episodes of the first two seasons. The third is currently in production.
            Two central characters are Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch), a police detective transferred from Cologne assigned to a vice squad, and Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries), a hostess in a nightclub and stereotypist who goes to work for him.  Gereon is a First World War veteran who needs drugs to calm his nerves.  Charlotte’s home is a squalid family flat.  There are many more characters in the richly-conceived intersecting storylines, one of which centres on a train from Soviet Russia carrying illicit poison gas and a supposed secret fortune in gold.  The political atmosphere—the doomed Weimar republic before the Great Depression and triumph of National Socialism—is fraught and feverish: one of decadence and despair, extremes and extortion, Communist and Trotskyite intrigue, violence in the streets, rearmament and fascist plots, and much more.  Not only are the performances outstanding across the board, the production team (helmed by master filmmaker Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries, and Henk Handloegten) have created an entire world that brings this intense febrile historical epoch to life as never before on the modern screen.
            The result truly deserves that overused term awesome.  The historical complexity also puts it above my previous best-ever television series, the Danish “Borgen” which has a contemporary political setting.  I can’t wait for the next episode.

Outlaw King  (UK/U.S.)

The Toronto International Film Festival has a history of dubious choices for its opening night gala presentations, getting scooped by Venice and Telluride for Oscar-worthy fare.  In some ways this made-for-Netflix production, a “big bloody mud-and-honour epic” as one fairly positive review calls it, is no exception.  The setting is 14th century Scotland and the subject is Robert the Bruce (Chris Pine) who takes up the Scottish crown in the wake of the martyrdom of the rebel William Wallace (see Mel Gibson’s Braveheart), rallying the clans to repulse the evil royal English overlords … which of course they do after terrible reprisals.
            No expense has been spared on the production, helmed by Scottish director David Mackenzie and shot on Scottish locations. Pine is fine as the warrior king and there are a few tender even racy scenes with his wife, a goddaughter of the English monarch Edward I who expires en route to the ultimate battle showdown. The focus however is on the action of swords and savagery, guts and gore.  Worth watching, but only if you have the stomach for that sort of thing.    

  

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