Ordeal by Innocence
Ordeal by Innocence
TV-MA | 01 April 2018 (USA)
SEASON & EPISODES
  • 1
  • Reviews
    Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable
    Seraherrera The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity
    Keeley Coleman The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;
    Kinley This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows
    rdm1947 Ridiculous interactions between characters and ludicrous dialog. Of course a few "F" words to make it edgy. I gave three instead of one star because some of the actors were giving the script a mighty try. It didn't work.
    thdoctor-29664 This was great, and obviously well acted, written, and directed. Unlike some of the other reviewers, I love Christie, but I'm not so much of a purist that the changes to the book offended me...perhaps the writer had an original idea floating around and then adapted it to become similar to Christie's book. The third act, in which all the flashbacks and hints come together to reveal what really happened, is tremendous.
    lachy_bursle If you can deal with terrible script and corny filming then the last episode is good. It's darker and better overall....just getting there is so difficult!
    maryon-1 Presumably - as with the majority of BBC writers - Sarah Phelps is unable to come up with her own plots and so pinches those of other writers.That's fine of course, and this stealing of other people's ideas has a long, long history - but real writers use the armature and then cover it with their own work of art.The BBC, however, has a long history of distorting the armature willy nilly before even beginning to create; then the creation proves nothing except that whichever scriptwriter is responsible hasn't understood the original work.If Sarah Phelps and the BBC are so creative that they know better than Agatha Christie how to create a plot and tell a story (Agatha Christie is only the world's best-selling author - ever - after all...), then why don't they create their own work from scratch?Or at least leave the armature intact.There are artistic reasons for making changes to an original work if you're reproducing them at a later date. None of those reasons exist here (that's why Agatha Christie's work is devoured by each successive generation of readers). So the changes are gratuitous, and artistically pointless.Good points:The opening sequence was mesmerising and atmosphericThe acting was good in the main (shame about the direction and pace)It was a long dramatisation and so served to pass the timeBad points: The sets and props were wrong in so many waysThe music was, as so often with BBC productions, over-loud and intrusiveThe direction was turgid and made the characters even more unpalatable (and, dare it be said, boring) than even the script had rendered themThe plot wasn't Agatha Christie's 'Ordeal by Innocence' (so why bill it as such?)The plot lacked subtlety, characterisation (just the usual BBC cardboard figures) and, ultimately, interestIt was way overlong, extended by a slow pace throughout, pointless bits of cinematography, overlong close-ups, pieces of graphic insertion wherever possible, etc. - all in the interests of padding out the thin plot to stretch over three episodesThank heavens Agatha Christie will never know.
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