It is nice to see a series about World War One for a change as it is a subject that isn't covered all that often, at least compared to other conflicts.
Unfortunately however my main gripe with this series is that it's clearly intended for a pre-watershed audience. People die from nonspecific wounds, no one has any blood on them, no one swears and curses at their impending deaths...
It's not that I want to see limbs flying off after shell impacts and people dripping with blood to slake some sick desire for gore but this was the reality of the conflict. It was horrific. Dumbing it down for the sake of censorship strikes me as being kind of offensive. It fails to get across just how awful the situation was for those involved in it and ultimately makes the viewer feel disconnected from the events on screen. Why show it at all if you are not going to show it right? For example seeing people getting cut down by a machine gun would be horrific. Seeing people falling over without scratch on them after some vague bang bang noises off camera just doesn't quite have the same impact. They might as well just be firing paintballs at the rows of approaching enemies.
I've been watching it on iPlayer and it was only because the next episode just showed up online that I realised it was in a 7pm broadcast slot. It seems pretty obtuse to me that you can happily show hundreds of people dying in this time slot but not show a single person physically getting shot. It paints a completely false picture of events and almost seems to glorify the conflict as one big game rather than a serious event.
If we want people to look back and remember the lessons of the past then they shouldn't be half-lessons which haze over anything deemed unsavoury.
Earlier in the year The Crimson Field was shown on the BBC. It wasn't focused on the battlefield but did not shy away from the true terror of warfare. After the battles had ended and the gunfire had died down it showed the aftermath of events. The Passing Bells does this too at the Somme but despite trying to be all sombre and dramatic it simply fails because not a single soldier has so much as a drop of blood on them or even a bullet hole in their clothing. It seems that there is something seriously wrong when The Crimson Field only showed people being brought in on stretchers after the battle and yet managed to paint a more terrifying picture of what had happened than when this series actually tried to show it happening.
This unrealistic disconnection from events as they happened makes me question why they even bothered to film a series so heavily focused on battle action. The series has more than enough human drama that it could have just filled it with this instead. Showing battle scenes in anything other than full realism just isn't really going to work these days when multimillion blockbuster films are out there, so why bother? Also each episode seems to cover one year of the conflict and frankly half an hour just isn't enough to get through all the stuff it is trying to cover. There is little character development as a result and soldiers go from being green recruits to battle hardened veterans in the blink of an eye.
The first episode made me think that it might touch on some of the lesser known stories from the war. For instance I didn't know about the British making homemade bombs due to a supply shortage. Unfortunately it just sort of jumps from place to place after that in a really disconnected fashion.
In short the series would have benefited from a later time slot and one hour episodes.
Unfortunately however my main gripe with this series is that it's clearly intended for a pre-watershed audience. People die from nonspecific wounds, no one has any blood on them, no one swears and curses at their impending deaths...
It's not that I want to see limbs flying off after shell impacts and people dripping with blood to slake some sick desire for gore but this was the reality of the conflict. It was horrific. Dumbing it down for the sake of censorship strikes me as being kind of offensive. It fails to get across just how awful the situation was for those involved in it and ultimately makes the viewer feel disconnected from the events on screen. Why show it at all if you are not going to show it right? For example seeing people getting cut down by a machine gun would be horrific. Seeing people falling over without scratch on them after some vague bang bang noises off camera just doesn't quite have the same impact. They might as well just be firing paintballs at the rows of approaching enemies.
I've been watching it on iPlayer and it was only because the next episode just showed up online that I realised it was in a 7pm broadcast slot. It seems pretty obtuse to me that you can happily show hundreds of people dying in this time slot but not show a single person physically getting shot. It paints a completely false picture of events and almost seems to glorify the conflict as one big game rather than a serious event.
If we want people to look back and remember the lessons of the past then they shouldn't be half-lessons which haze over anything deemed unsavoury.
Earlier in the year The Crimson Field was shown on the BBC. It wasn't focused on the battlefield but did not shy away from the true terror of warfare. After the battles had ended and the gunfire had died down it showed the aftermath of events. The Passing Bells does this too at the Somme but despite trying to be all sombre and dramatic it simply fails because not a single soldier has so much as a drop of blood on them or even a bullet hole in their clothing. It seems that there is something seriously wrong when The Crimson Field only showed people being brought in on stretchers after the battle and yet managed to paint a more terrifying picture of what had happened than when this series actually tried to show it happening.
This unrealistic disconnection from events as they happened makes me question why they even bothered to film a series so heavily focused on battle action. The series has more than enough human drama that it could have just filled it with this instead. Showing battle scenes in anything other than full realism just isn't really going to work these days when multimillion blockbuster films are out there, so why bother? Also each episode seems to cover one year of the conflict and frankly half an hour just isn't enough to get through all the stuff it is trying to cover. There is little character development as a result and soldiers go from being green recruits to battle hardened veterans in the blink of an eye.
The first episode made me think that it might touch on some of the lesser known stories from the war. For instance I didn't know about the British making homemade bombs due to a supply shortage. Unfortunately it just sort of jumps from place to place after that in a really disconnected fashion.
In short the series would have benefited from a later time slot and one hour episodes.