With the arrival in Celtic Britain of the second Roman invasion, both onlookers and members of warring factions look for ways to survive, to avert catastrophe, or to seek a glorious destiny.
BRITANNIA's opening episode begins with an unnamed mystic character later dubbed The Outcast performing divining rituals in an unknown tongue. He emerges from his visions sprawled in a tree and says to the sky, "Oh $#1t". The show is promising to span both relatable realities and exotic otherworlds.
As the story expands into worlds of mud and sky and a cast caked in sweat and blood, this seems like an intensified version of revisionist retelling of legends, as seen in films like 2004's KING ARTHUR. This cinematically ambitious series serves up gorgeous cinematography of dramatic landscapes, and elaborately detailed designs for sets and for characters' distinct adornment. A particularly memorable example is the creepy witchiness of the Druids, with their uncannily over-dilated pupils.
The Druids also exemplify BRITTANNIA's distinctive take on pagan mysticism - riding the boundary between grounded folk religion and hints of the supernatural. A coming-of age-festival turns into what looks like Burning Man in Britain; The Outcast displays a mix of superstitious confabulation and seeming actual occult insights.
The recurrent intrusions of disorienting altered states for characters, which are coded visually by blurring at the borders of the frame,, did occasionally seem repetitive. However, that is a minor irritating qubble compared to the potential pay offs from a story written with a larger psychedelic vision in mind. It should be worth persisting to see if the filmmakers can tune the show's visual storytelling to match its themes.
Beyond prestige tv production values and visual spectacle, the cast of characters - already sprawling and due to expand yet more - are mostly sketched effectively by their actions and by conflicts illustrating their concerns. Some, however get just opaque hints that will either hook you with a mystery or leave you guessing.
One tribe's assassin gets her quest ( and thus her screentime ) sidelined by the Romans' arrival. However, she concisely demonstrates confidence and preparation that will presumably enable her to rise to the changing situation.
This show is making a solid stab at avoiding the pitfalls of historical dramatisations. They can settle for reducing events to commonplace inevitabilities which can obscure the represented experience of those denizens - people who lived through their own era as an unfolding unwritten present. As has been said, the past is a different country, and they do things differently there.
How might it have felt to live in a culture with distinctly different expectations of their future? What would the costs and struggle to preserve or destroy their changing world have been like? BRITANNIA sets out to insert the viewer into multiple adjacent interacting worlds at once, spanning the perspectives of major players - the Romans and vassal cultures present among the Roman legions; the warring tribes of Britons; and noncombatants.
The use of contrasting tones is a critical element here. Sweary history is fun, as when a Roman general boosts the morale of a traumatised rookie soldier by telling him to take a dump on the Britons' land. Touches like that profane wit make them seem more like real soldiers than ciphers from a history textbook.
Populating a story with colloquially articulate characters reacting to personally significant events that impinge on them is a great way to make vigourous drama out of a past that might otherwise seem just static. The Roman general receives an intimately targeted challenge from a Druid version of a Manchurian-candidate psy-ops assault. The general's loud defIance in response makes his determination and leadership seem more than that of a carelessly bold would-be conqueror.
Similarly, one Celtic tribal prince gets to show off his clear minded tactical skills, making him a common enough type in war stories. He also, however, shows befuddled reactions to the politics that oblige his voracious wife to share her sexual favours with a tribal ally. This plays out in a sex scene which is intense, exotic and titillating, but it is nonetheless built around humorously relatable character beats. ( Note also that besides sex, the show is peppered with other adult content including bloody violence. The violence is often presented impressionistically but also occasionally as brutal gore. )
The character of The Outcast takes the mixing of tones to a kind of breaking point. This is most apparent in an exposition scene where he seems to declare his own intended mythic-hero arc for the series. Coming from a character written and performed as a self-important areshole, that declaration seems pathetically deluded.
Knowing that the storylines of the show will surely demand that The Outcast discover a quite different path, facing his limitations and challenges in some quite different way- is by itself a big enough hook to keep me watching this series.
BRITANNIA's opening episode begins with an unnamed mystic character later dubbed The Outcast performing divining rituals in an unknown tongue. He emerges from his visions sprawled in a tree and says to the sky, "Oh $#1t". The show is promising to span both relatable realities and exotic otherworlds.
As the story expands into worlds of mud and sky and a cast caked in sweat and blood, this seems like an intensified version of revisionist retelling of legends, as seen in films like 2004's KING ARTHUR. This cinematically ambitious series serves up gorgeous cinematography of dramatic landscapes, and elaborately detailed designs for sets and for characters' distinct adornment. A particularly memorable example is the creepy witchiness of the Druids, with their uncannily over-dilated pupils.
The Druids also exemplify BRITTANNIA's distinctive take on pagan mysticism - riding the boundary between grounded folk religion and hints of the supernatural. A coming-of age-festival turns into what looks like Burning Man in Britain; The Outcast displays a mix of superstitious confabulation and seeming actual occult insights.
The recurrent intrusions of disorienting altered states for characters, which are coded visually by blurring at the borders of the frame,, did occasionally seem repetitive. However, that is a minor irritating qubble compared to the potential pay offs from a story written with a larger psychedelic vision in mind. It should be worth persisting to see if the filmmakers can tune the show's visual storytelling to match its themes.
Beyond prestige tv production values and visual spectacle, the cast of characters - already sprawling and due to expand yet more - are mostly sketched effectively by their actions and by conflicts illustrating their concerns. Some, however get just opaque hints that will either hook you with a mystery or leave you guessing.
One tribe's assassin gets her quest ( and thus her screentime ) sidelined by the Romans' arrival. However, she concisely demonstrates confidence and preparation that will presumably enable her to rise to the changing situation.
This show is making a solid stab at avoiding the pitfalls of historical dramatisations. They can settle for reducing events to commonplace inevitabilities which can obscure the represented experience of those denizens - people who lived through their own era as an unfolding unwritten present. As has been said, the past is a different country, and they do things differently there.
How might it have felt to live in a culture with distinctly different expectations of their future? What would the costs and struggle to preserve or destroy their changing world have been like? BRITANNIA sets out to insert the viewer into multiple adjacent interacting worlds at once, spanning the perspectives of major players - the Romans and vassal cultures present among the Roman legions; the warring tribes of Britons; and noncombatants.
The use of contrasting tones is a critical element here. Sweary history is fun, as when a Roman general boosts the morale of a traumatised rookie soldier by telling him to take a dump on the Britons' land. Touches like that profane wit make them seem more like real soldiers than ciphers from a history textbook.
Populating a story with colloquially articulate characters reacting to personally significant events that impinge on them is a great way to make vigourous drama out of a past that might otherwise seem just static. The Roman general receives an intimately targeted challenge from a Druid version of a Manchurian-candidate psy-ops assault. The general's loud defIance in response makes his determination and leadership seem more than that of a carelessly bold would-be conqueror.
Similarly, one Celtic tribal prince gets to show off his clear minded tactical skills, making him a common enough type in war stories. He also, however, shows befuddled reactions to the politics that oblige his voracious wife to share her sexual favours with a tribal ally. This plays out in a sex scene which is intense, exotic and titillating, but it is nonetheless built around humorously relatable character beats. ( Note also that besides sex, the show is peppered with other adult content including bloody violence. The violence is often presented impressionistically but also occasionally as brutal gore. )
The character of The Outcast takes the mixing of tones to a kind of breaking point. This is most apparent in an exposition scene where he seems to declare his own intended mythic-hero arc for the series. Coming from a character written and performed as a self-important areshole, that declaration seems pathetically deluded.
Knowing that the storylines of the show will surely demand that The Outcast discover a quite different path, facing his limitations and challenges in some quite different way- is by itself a big enough hook to keep me watching this series.
