While the cinematography by Gavin Kelly goes a long way to creating the creepy dread needed to make the premise of this eighth season work, you can't help but wonder if that's all that's making it work. Sure the costumes are great, but this is AHS, so it's all got to be flamboyant. The musical leitmotif(s?) are effective but this is AHS so every scene has got to be saturated in music to hammer the horror home.
Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk seem to have made the same mistake as in 'Cult' that taking a hot topic and finding the sheer horror in it doesn't create good dialogue, story or characters. From the very opening scene, we're introduced to Evan Peters' and Leslie Grossman's characters - two pastiches drawn with such thick strokes that the painting elephant can't even handle the brush. Later, when a character hears who else will be in a fallout shelter, her response of "rich people, of course" smacks of the same dualistic us-versus-them attitude that Murphy and Falchuk actually did well to challenge last year. It feels like the show regresses every year.
To some, this is sufficient entertainment. But Murphy and Falchuk can't even trust their fans to work out for themselves that someone jumping out of a building during a nuclear missile warning is committing suicide to not have to live through the fallout. There has always got to be someone blurting exposition. This is a show where a character's very presence commands silence when she walks into a room, but she still rings a bell, because... it looks cool?You can't have a good story without genuine dialogue coming from genuine characters, and unfortunately Apocalypse stacks up too many wince-enducing moments to make it all work. Not even Sarah Paulson Evan Peters are able to make their characters seem like anything more than caricatures. And with their calibre, that's saying alot.
So it all comes down to the look of it all. Sure, there's nice creepy use made of architectural symmetry and low lighting. Candlelight reflected in champagne glasses. 'Hotel' shared that same sumptuous positive aspect, but again, Hotel was brought down by the sheer lack of vision and an inability to make anything thrown at it stick.
This reviewer will no doubt be watching the rest of the series hoping that some life can come out of this nuclear wasteland. But by the end, it might all be just another "meh"... which is admittedly not the effect you would hope a show set during a nuclear apocalypse would give you.
