The Witcher: Blood Origin (TV Mini Series) Of Mages, Malice, and Monstrous Mayhem (2022) User Reviews

A solid ending to the series

[Rok_S2001 · 6/10 · 2 January 2023]

The episode continues in the same style as the episodes before it, as it isn't a spectacular episode, but it also isn't all in all bad.

I really liked the twist, when we though that Scian would betray the rest of the company, but it turned out she did this so that they could infiltrate the city.

I was surprised by the transformation of Fjall and how he turned out. I find it also interesting, how after Fjall the people decided: let's to the same thing to children (but that is a little beside the point and I'm probably not considering some other factors).

All in all, the final was an okay episode and a solid conclusion to the series, despite having some weaker or even cringy moments (how things turned out for the new empress).

Tough Beginning for The Witcher

[Johnny_West · 1/10 · 31 December 2022]

Henry Cavill is a pretty big man, so he can pull off morphing into The Witcher by just having his skin get whiter and the black veins popping up on his skin. Unfortunately the actor who was picked to be the primal first Witcher is a lot smaller.

When he Witches out, the most ridiculous and pathetic CGI is used to make him "Hulk Out" and get super-muscular. One side gets bigger than the other, and he gets a Quasimodo hunchback effect. Even worse, the skin is all lumpy so they manage to make him look ridiculous and gross at the same time.

He also loses his humanity and starts tearing apart the good guys too. Fortunately, his girlfriend is there to sing to him, and bring him down. Once again the idea that he becomes human when he calms down is a direct rip-off of The Incredible Hulk. Apparently the people that wrote this crud never read or watched The Witcher, but they are fans of The Incredible Hulk.

Besides the awful CGI Hulking Out, the dragon villain was sad and lame. Even the Sy-Fy Channel can put together better sub-par CGI than this.

The actual story was just beyond poor. The main evil wizard seem to have more in common with the Wishmaster or Hellraiser movies than the original Witcher TV series. It felt like the writers took from Hellraiser, Wishmaster, and The Incredible Hulk and put something together that was lame. The Witcher TV series seems to have a mythos and back-story that was at least partly ignored.

Like a good D&D campaign (part 4)

[devincolborn · 7/10 · 4 January 2023]

All good things must come to an end. Some ends are... More-climactic than others.

I definitely felt that Marwyn's end was awesome. Eile's choice of "You can leave the blade in and maybe live to watch your empire crumble, or pull it out and die a coward" was absolutely hardcore.

The other ends however... Could've been executed a bit better.

Fjall fighting the dragon was always destined to be a disappointment. Even in the mainline Witcher series, the fights against giant CGI monsters were always underwhelming. It's very hard to pull off having a real person fight a CGI monster and make it feel engaging. Even big-budget Hollywood movies have a hard time pulling it off. You could probably count on one hand the number of times its been done well. So I won't take too many points off for it.

The fight between Balor & Syndril however... Yeah, that was a bit disappointing too. Syndril's solution of "using his Chaos against him" could have been done well if they had gone the route of, say, forcing Balor to over-exhert himself and his newfound power by fighting defensively and baiting him into drawing on too much magic. It would have played into the themes well, as Balor's pride would be his downfall. Instead, Syndril is just like "I'm gonna shoot lightning at him and absorb his Chaos magic and use it to blow up the Monolith" and it just... Works. That's it. That's the whole fight. Very disappointing, and probably the lowest point in the series for me.

That aside, I still enjoyed this series as a whole. And like many D&D campaigns, an anticlimactic ending doesn't necessarily mean the whole campaign was bad. Most of my favorite memories from my Games were usually somewhere in the beginning or middle of the story. So despite the rough ending, I'm still rating this series favorably. Blood Origin is definitely worth checking out if you have 3ish hours to kill.