Review of Castles in the Sky (2014) by Grant S — 03 Dec 2015
Eddie Izzard is great in the lead, but the series suffers from a problem that I've seen several times in low quality BBC miniseries based on historical events: they don't have a clue how to make their story interesting.
To be specific they don't have enough faith in the audience to give us complicated exposition and instead explain all the details to us Star Trek style, by giving us complicated technobabble and then summing up with a patronizing analogy that the characters shouldn't need.
Except sometimes they don't even bother with the technobabble. The real difficulty is the absence of any conflict.Struggling to make a machine work is not the stuff of standard dramas. Sans technobabble we're left with external conflicts, in this case a group of ridiculously toffish superiors who want them to fail (and thereby doom Britain) because they're not from Oxbridge.
I get that class snobbery is a thing, and that it was even bigger then than now, but this is well into parody. As a result, anything serious falls flat and anything funny is let down by the absence of interest in these characters.
Only occasionally is Eddie Izzard able to overcome the film's moribund sensibilities and make his character seem alive. And it's not enough.
This review of Castles in the Sky (2014) was written by Grant S on 03 Dec 2015.
Castles in the Sky has generally received mixed reviews.
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