When the DrsC finished watching the first season of World on Fire, I promised to post a review. We finished this evening and this is the promised review.
The miniseries follows a Polish family, a German family, two British families, and an abbreviated American family. The first year’s seven episodes cover the period from just before Hitler invades Poland until the Battle of Britain.
Like all recent productions, the series scripts are more “woke” than strict historic accuracy would have suggested. Nazi elimination of racial and LGBTQ minorities and the handicapped did occur, but affected far fewer of those in occupied territories than the 2 families out of five ratio in WoF scripts. Plus what we now call PTSD afflicts a larger percentage of those portrayed than likely was the actual case. It’s a reflection of the bent times we live in.
It is good to see established actors like Sean Bean and Helen Hunt in roles that lie outside their normal range of portrayals. Bean plays a WW I vet still suffering lingering effects of “shell shock’ as they called PTSD. Hunt’s American journalist is a tough but brittle survivor of her own checkered past. Watching British actress Lesley Manville play a upper class woman trying to negotiate the class-scrambled aspects of wartime Britain is a treat.
The special effects are fantastic. The warplanes portrayed actually resemble the real planes of the period. It may be CG but it is superb work. In my experience this degree of realism is unusual in the extreme.
The other DrC and I concluded that we liked the series and will definitely watch next year’s episodes when they become available. World War II is a fantastic backdrop against which to portray damaged human lives.
