Stylish but barely mediocre overall
Best movie ever!
Absolutely Fantastic
The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.
View MoreI literally lasted for 2 minutes after the titles. What a load of dog sausage!! As my headline suggests....MacGyver on an island would've been a better title!! Maybe I should have hung on for a few more minutes, then I may have seen the hot showers, launderettes and razors that kept everyone so well groomed and clean ( on ship and island). It was a bit like watching Westerns from the 60's- 80's.....Complete and utter BULLSH*T.....TV for the dumb again!!!
View MoreAs a lifelong Robinson Crusoe fan I was excited to find this show. The drama flits between excellent period drama driven by Sam Neill's conniving Jeremiah Blackthorne and the absurd and twee politically correct world on the island.Robinson Crusoe has set up an Ewok style village in the trees with Ichabod Crane style ingenuity that, just as in Sleepy Hollow, is designed to amuse a modern audience. Phillip Winchester plays a decent role as Robinson Crusoe for the most part but is so much lighter in countenance than Defoe's Crusoe or anyone else marooned on an island for years and is reminiscent of Michael Praed's Robin Hood but Praed's romantically brooding sadness has been replaced with a slightly smug confidence in his own ability and 21st century values.I am also confused at the choice of Tongayi Chirisa as "Friday", a rescued sacrificial victim. He looks and sounds African which would have made no sense for a South American tribesman in the 17th century. Also why he would speak English to his father when the Spanish sailors speak Spanish to each other is a mystery of modern screen writing.The dialogue between Crusoe and Friday is often trite and primarily involves Crusoe being right about more or less everything yet telling everyone how much he respects Friday as an equal - yet he admits on several occasions that he only calls him "Friday" because he couldn't pronounce his real name, which slightly smacks of racism "a l'indifference".Crusoe's biggest problem as television is patchy writing and while the finale ticks all the boxes and is genuinely exciting, huge chunks of the show seem to just feature Robinson and Friday playing around and this is not only wasted story time but ultimately meant that ratings dropped beneath the recommissioning level. I would have been far more interested in both characters' backstories in a more detailed way than the barely satisfactory flashback sequences we are given and also just a little bit less smiling and a bit more grit.Also it drives me crazy how when fighting bloodthirsty cannibals or pirates that Robinson and Friday are happier to kick their foe in the head than kill them...very "A-Team" I am afraid. Also despite Friday being lauded constantly by Crusoe for his warrior skills and intelligence, Friday twice allows captives to play dead and then take him prisoner and fails to realise that when he has his own hands chained that he could easily throttle his captor with his foot long manacle chain.Visually superb however and a great show for kids, I wanted this to be so much better than it was and it had the cast, crew and writers (based on the bits filmed in England at least) to do so. Sadly not surprised it didn't get a second season. Too bad!
View MoreThis show is well worth the effort to watch. It's "Horatio Hornblower" meets "Castaway" meets "Pirates of the Caribbean." It has plots and a sub plot that will keep your attention and make it difficult to wait a week for the next episode! It's clean and Crusoe has exemplary integrity through very difficult odds. Each week you will learn a new piece of information about how Crusoe got to the island, and how he and Friday became inseparable. Unless you are a hyper-critical couch potato that has nothing better to do than rip apart well-rounded TV shows, you'll love this show! It definitely beats those shows full of social drama, immorality, and graphic psychos. If I wanted to see that I could walk outside and look around.
View MoreStuck at home on a Friday night, I saw a trailer for this way back in the summer and thought "oh this is gonna be sweet!!!!" so I popped the popcorn and began to watch it. The second the character Robinson Crusoe started talking, I thought "What the hell? Is that supposed to be a British accent?" Phillip Winchester did terrible, I thought, and the Friday character wasn't very interesting either. The pirates sucked. In all, the acting is god-awful. I felt like the whole time i wanted to just scream at them to get off the set. Hopefully, throughout the season, the acting and the plot will be more sophisticated and enjoyable.
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