This review is for the Russian audio/English subtitled version. Overall, I enjoyed this series.
I started watching this 6 hour series one night, paused about 2 hours after my normal bedtime, and then finished it the next morning. Overall, I found myself immersed in the story most of the time. I found the character development and conflict to be very good. Overall, I found myself caring about many of these characters. I thought the acting was solid for the most part. The writing and editing lacked some cohesion at times, but was solid enough that the plot and story lines usually pulled back together reasonably quickly. The biggest weakness in this was that it sometimes seemed like the writers couldn't decide if this was going to be a 4 hour tighter story or a complete 12 to 15 episode series with more individual stories within an overarching season long story.
At times, I lost track of who was who as there were competing groups and individuals that I could not tell apart. I'm not sure how much of that was lack of editing, subtitle issues, or cultural clues (clothing, uniforms, etc.) that a Russian viewer would have found obvious.
Now to the biggest problem. Many people will find the subtitles next to unusable. Slang and jargon were usually translated literally, some grammatical things were missed or incorrect, and my sense is that some complicated dialog was oversimplified too much. The number of typos suggest the subtitles were rushed or done very cheaply. If not for my experience with language learning and dealing with written translations of various quality and literalness, I'd have probably given up trying to wade through these subtitles.
I started watching this 6 hour series one night, paused about 2 hours after my normal bedtime, and then finished it the next morning. Overall, I found myself immersed in the story most of the time. I found the character development and conflict to be very good. Overall, I found myself caring about many of these characters. I thought the acting was solid for the most part. The writing and editing lacked some cohesion at times, but was solid enough that the plot and story lines usually pulled back together reasonably quickly. The biggest weakness in this was that it sometimes seemed like the writers couldn't decide if this was going to be a 4 hour tighter story or a complete 12 to 15 episode series with more individual stories within an overarching season long story.
At times, I lost track of who was who as there were competing groups and individuals that I could not tell apart. I'm not sure how much of that was lack of editing, subtitle issues, or cultural clues (clothing, uniforms, etc.) that a Russian viewer would have found obvious.
Now to the biggest problem. Many people will find the subtitles next to unusable. Slang and jargon were usually translated literally, some grammatical things were missed or incorrect, and my sense is that some complicated dialog was oversimplified too much. The number of typos suggest the subtitles were rushed or done very cheaply. If not for my experience with language learning and dealing with written translations of various quality and literalness, I'd have probably given up trying to wade through these subtitles.
