FX’s “Shogun” Is A Stunning Accomplishment

MINOR SPOILERS FOR SHŌGUN EPISODES 1 – 2 AHEAD!

Epics. Every streaming service (with the possible exception of Peacock and Paramount+) has one nowadays – a visibly expensive series of breathtaking scale and scope, typically an adaptation of a classic fantasy, sci-fi, or historical fiction novel, boasting inspired cinematography, immersive production design, stunning visual effects, gripping action sequences, an outstanding cast, and in at least a few cases, strong writing to match. Think HBO’s House Of The Dragon, Amazon’s The Rings Of Power, Andor on Disney+, Apple TV’s Foundation, Netflix’s…uh, relentless barrage of live-action anime adaptations and projects set in The Witcher universe? Most of these are good shows. A few are even great. But with high price-tags come even higher expectations, and in this economy it’s not enough to be a good show, or even a great one. You have to be the best, and your first season needs to be an unprecedented success within its weekend of release, or you’re getting canceled. So every one of these shows is inevitably and unfairly measured up to Game Of Thrones, which for one brief shining moment in television history had all of the aforementioned elements in abundance as well as keeping audiences glued to their TVs week-to-week, and most fall short. Heck, even Game Of Thrones itself went from being great to good, to just okay, to downright bad, over the course of its last three seasons, though that didn’t stop the controversial finale from having record-breaking viewership (somewhat justifying the slew of spin-offs and prequels that HBO has greenlit since).

Hiroyuki Sanada as Yoshii Toranaga in Shogun, seated on a white horse on a grassy hillside, with a hawk perched on his hand. He is wearing golden-brown garments, and a tall straw hat with a chinstrap.
Yoshii Toranaga | ca.style.yahoo.com

So when I saw that critics were using the phrase “the next Game Of Thrones” to describe Hulu and FX’s Shōgun – a remake of the 1980 miniseries adapted from James Clavell’s best-selling 1975 novel by the same name – I didn’t think too much of it. I’ve heard the phrase misused so many times before that it’s lost virtually any and all meaning that it ever had. There is no “next” Game Of Thrones because streaming doesn’t accommodate that kind of communal viewing experience the way television did for Thrones, and streaming shows are given too few episodes and seasons to gradually prove their value, as Thrones did. Don’t get me wrong, in a fair and just world, Shōgun would absolutely be a cultural phenomenon, maybe even running for several seasons and accumulating dozens of Emmy awards and other accolades along the way to a satisfying series finale, but it doesn’t have to be. What it is, however, is an extremely high-quality production with a fine-tuned script, so in that regard, I suppose it is comparable to early Game Of Thrones, and probably more deserving of the comparison than most.

Now, I’ll confess, I’ve never seen the original miniseries and only read about a quarter of the book before putting it down, as I recall being unmoved by Clavell’s writing style and suspicious that the protagonist would turn out to be a white savior (though I’ve heard that’s not the case), so this reimagining of Shōgun wasn’t on my radar until fairly recently. But that only makes the pilot episode more of a triumph, in my opinion, because even without much prior knowledge of the story I was hooked in almost instantly – by the artistry, authenticity, and attention to detail on display in every frame, by the magnificent performances from the entire cast, and by the subversive score from Atticus Ross, Leopold Ross, and Nick Chuba.

This adaptation’s smartest and most significant deviation from the source material is in putting the focus squarely on Shōgun‘s Japanese characters, thereby gently nudging English explorer John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) into a secondary role for which he’s much better suited. He still functions like a window for (white, Western) viewers into the (to white Westerners) unfamiliar world of feudal Japan throughout the first episode, but Shōgun trusts its audience not to need him after a certain point and to come join the party on the other side of that window where all the really interesting stuff is happening, leaving Blackthorne to just keep strutting around confidently – and most amusingly – as if he’s the protagonist, while in reality, he’s unknowingly being used as a pawn in the power struggle between Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) and the other warlords on Japan’s ruling Council of Regents, spearheaded by Ishido Kazunari (Takehiro Hira).

Sanada, who also serves as a producer on Shōgun and was instrumental in getting this series made in the first place and, furthermore, made with historical accuracy front-of-mind, needs virtually no introduction after more than fifty years spent working across every medium and genre, but outside Japan, audiences far too rarely get a chance to see him in starring roles (in Hollywood blockbusters, most egregiously in Avengers: Endgame, he’s often cast as expendable sword-wielding villains). Shōgun rectifies that. Sanada lifts a sword only once in the first two episodes, and his most memorable scenes have him employing carefully-selected words and precipitous silences as his weapons of choice in negotiations with his enemies and prospective allies. With any stoic and seemingly unshakeable character, there is a balance that must be skillfully maintained to convince the audience of both their humanity and their almost inhuman composure in equal parts, and Sanada walks that invisible line with such ease that you simply have to marvel. It is especially evident through his profoundly intimate conversations with Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai), a noblewoman of his house whom he appoints to be Blackthorne’s translator, that Toranaga’s sincerity and his solemnity are not in conflict nor in danger of canceling each other out, but in fact conspire to keep him on the path to victory.

Anna Sawai as Toda Mariko in Shogun, kneeling on straw-mats covering the floor of a large room. She is wearing a white robe over a black and blood-red kimono and has a crucifix on a necklace. She has long black hair, parted in the middle. There are people seated behind her and to either side.
Toda Mariko | dish.com

Mariko, on the other hand, finds herself torn in different directions by her loyalty to Toranaga and her commitment to her Catholic faith, after Blackthorne’s arrival brings with it the chilling revelation that the Portuguese missionaries embedded in Japan are but the forerunners of a brutal empire that would absorb the country and eradicate its culture. In the middle-ground, that limitless sandbox, Anna Sawai sculpts the series’ most complex and formidable character, who must overcome obstacles that do not exist for the men around her if she intends not only to survive the dark days ahead but carve out a path for herself across blood-soaked battlefields. Her performance is made up of subtle, immensely purposeful movements – the merest flicker of the eyes conveys a hundred emotions.

The cast are backed up by a clean, concise script from Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks (among others) that moves between Japanese, English, and English-representing-Portuguese (one of the few immersion-breaking choices in the series, but ultimately a small grievance to hold against it). The original miniseries notoriously shunned the use of subtitles, a decision one could conceivably praise as subversive if it weren’t made with the explicit intention of shackling the series’ majority non-Japanese speaking audience to the viewpoint of the white Western protagonist, Blackthorne. All this while also aggressively whittling down the book to focus exclusively on Blackthorne, discarding many of the Japanese characters, their subplots, and with them, just about everything I can think of that makes Shōgun worth adapting in the first place. As I’ve mentioned, this new iteration of the story distributes the focus more evenly amongst its cast, denying us access to no crucial scene because Blackthorne isn’t there to witness it.

While I am by no means qualified to speak over actual historians, Japanese historians in particular, as to everything that Shōgun gets right (or wrong; in a production of this scale, it would be shocking if a few small inaccuracies didn’t slip past even the most hands-on cultural consultant, but I have not yet come across any), it has been heartening to hear the whole cast and crew emphasize the importance of telling this story as truthfully as possible, with Japanese creatives in key positions behind the camera as well as in front of it, and to have this further accentuated by the series’ clear, crisp lighting that ensures no aspect of the set design, costume design, or visual effects used to reconstruct entire early 17th Century Japanese cities and castles on Vancouver backlots is lost in the literal darkness that has subsumed so much of modern television as a quick fix for dodgy CGI and cheap wigs. There is a tangible sense of age and wear and depth to every set, every costume, every prop and piece of furniture, on this show.

Now, to be clear, lavish production design is only half the battle in making a visually outstanding piece of television. Good lighting also helps, but cinematography is crucial. I can think of several shows with genuinely beautiful set decoration and costumes and whatnot, that are burdened down by conventional cinematographers who prioritize blunt efficacy over artistry. Shōgun does not suffer from that problem, at least not under Christopher Ross (Ross, whose credits most shockingly include the film adaptation of Cats, only worked on the first two episodes). Intentionally or not, the elegant composition of each shot heavily evokes the artform of Japanese garden design, and many of the same design elements that go into creating these three-dimensional structures, concepts such as empty space, enclosure, and borrowed scenery, can be found in the texture of Shōgun‘s cinematography, albeit adapted for the stark rectangular confines of a television or phone screen.

Cosmo Jarvis as John Blackthorne in Shogun, from the chest up, wearing a dark brown robe. He has close-cropped brown hair and a beard.
John Blackthorne | msn.com

Debuting with a perfect score of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, which it was able to hold for a couple of days before dipping by a single point based on a single review, Shogun is poised to remain one of the highest-reviewed series’ of the year, and there is no doubt in my mind it will be a strong contender at next year’s Emmys in practically every category (it’s being called a limited series, but that term is used somewhat…liberally, these days). On every front, it is a mighty force. If that holds true throughout the remainder of this season, it may well be that future epics of this staggering scale and exceptional quality will no longer be measured up next to Game Of Thrones, but to Shōgun. Ideally, we would do away with the comparisons altogether, as they help pretty much nobody, but I for one would probably consider it the greatest honor of my life to someday have my work mentioned in the same breath as this masterpiece.

Review: 10/10

“Rebecca” 2020 Review!

I went into the 2020 adaptation of Daphne de Maurier’s classic crime thriller Rebecca prepared to at least try and like it. This was partly because I’ve watched Alfred Hitchcock’s famous adaptation, and…well, I have to admit I see why Hitchcock himself later attempted to distance himself from the film, feeling it wasn’t one of his best works. It’s actually quite good right up until the third act, where I feel it just becomes rather boring. So when I started hearing that this new Netflix adaptation makes some big changes to the ending of the story, I was curious and cautiously optimistic.

Rebecca
Lily James and Armie Hammer | cnn.com

Little did I know that the ending to 2020’s Rebecca isn’t just the worst part of the film, but also manages to make a mockery out of Daphne de Maurier’s story. So, without getting into spoilers, my advice to all of you is that, if you are also mistakenly led to believe that this film has some exciting new twist at the ending, don’t fall for it. Back out now. Save yourself two hours of your time and escape from Rebecca while you still can – because I assure you that as much as the characters in the movie might be trying desperately to convince you that it’s all terribly exciting to be caught up in her web of intrigue and betrayal, it’s really not.

The biggest problem with this new version of the classic story, which follows a nameless female protagonist (played by Lily James, usually a pure delight no matter how bland the role) as she tries to outmaneuver the phantoms of her mysterious husband’s ex-wife’s phantom, is that it simply can’t pick a single, consistent tone. Clearly it thinks it’s every bit as intellectual and engaging as its source material, a suspenseful novelette written in 1938, but at the same time it really just wants to be a modern, pulpy, “don’t-think-too-hard-about-this” kind of retelling, and the clash between those two wildly different ideas (both of which would probably be perfectly valid, separately) leads to a discombobulated hybrid that never feels able to stay on track for very long. I personally think it would be absolutely fine to go a little pulpier, a little campier even, and just transfer the whole story into a modern day setting and go from there, as long as de Maurier’s message was preserved (another thing 2020’s Rebecca failed to do). At least it would be a choice. But I feel like someone behind the scenes must have decided that they couldn’t possibly do that because it would rob the film of any “credibility” or “respectability” – two things which the screenwriters have tried to forcibly inject into the film’s dull, unsubtle script…to no avail, because at every turn they undermine their own best efforts with a string of anachronistic and jarring casting choices, mannerisms, styling decisions, story beats, and even song choices (modern indie music, in case you were wondering), none of which seem to have been designed with Academy Awards voters in mind.

Rebecca
Lily James and Armie Hammer | thefilmstage.com

And because the film can’t figure out its target audience, everyone loses. Sometimes it looks like it’s trying to aim for a demographic who love sensual, sensational, addictive page-turners, and it’s at these points where it unfortunately feels like it should be most comfortable – I say “unfortunately” not because this demographic is inferior to any other (in fact, Rebecca, at the time of its publication, was widely considered as pulp fiction for the masses), but because Rebecca simply can’t give this demographic what they want without alienating everyone who loves the original story because of what it has to say about romance, relationships and gender roles – things that are, for the most part, utterly foreign to the romance genre. Rebecca (the novel, that is) isn’t a typical romance, and that’s the problem. De Maurier herself called it “a study in jealousy”. But when the screenwriters of 2020’s Rebecca were faced with the task of adapting it, they chose to adapt it as one would a typical romance…and so their creation, a ghastly chimaera if ever I saw one, dies on impact. None of the storytelling choices made in the novel even feel suitable for the kind of story that this creative team are telling.

A good example of this is the namelessness of our protagonist: as in past iterations of the story, our heroine goes through the entire story, start to finish, without a name, only going by the title “the second Mrs. de Winter”, as a cruel, cynical reference to how she is unable to carve out any semblance of identity when compared to her predecessor, the incomparable Rebecca – but this version rarely if ever feels engaging enough on a psychological level to warrant keeping this bold decision by de Maurier (who was drawing on her own unhappy relationship with her husband and his ex-wife for inspiration). Then again, it rarely feels engaging, period.

This isn’t just because the script is badly-written: unfortunately, a large part of the blame falls on Lily James and especially Armie Hammer as Maxim de Winter (a character intended to be very charismatic and mysterious), neither of whom can muster much passion, fear, excitement or…well, any emotion, really. Not once in two hours does Armie Hammer manage to look even remotely interested in the supposedly very compelling and personal story unraveling at high speed all around him: mostly all he does is stand around and widen his eyes periodically to demonstrate anger or overwhelming emotion. Also, he sleepwalks…once, for some reason, because that’s a thing that apparently needed to happen.

That strange scene is only one in a series of back-to-back instances in which Lily James is repeatedly hammered (no pun intended) over the head with increasingly loud and unsubtle references to Rebecca. When she’s not being berated and physically attacked by Maxim’s elderly mother, who starts clawing at her after finding out that her dear daughter in law Rebecca is dead, she’s instead being passed handkerchiefs, hair brushes and various small household articles all monogrammed with Rebecca’s enormous initial. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but when it occurs in every scene for most of the second act, it’s hard to become hooked on the element of suspense. Jane Goldman’s script isn’t designed to cleverly lure you along on any sort of harrowing journey: it’s just a series of one character after another doing everything but breaking down the fourth wall to remind us about Rebecca. Hitchock’s script, in comparison, takes its time, spreading out these more obvious scenes and punctuating them with quieter, subtler moments that feel significant without needing to literally spell out why they’re significant. There’s even a (very random) scene with an entire swarm of birds that come dangerously close to forming the shape of a giant R in the sky.

Rebecca
Kristen Scott Thomas and Lily James | bostonhassle.com

The film’s greatest crime is what it does to Mrs. Danvers (Kristen Scott Thomas), an iconic character in literary and cinematic history. Thomas would probably be a good Mrs. Danvers in another writer and director’s hands, but her story – particularly its conclusion – are bungled this time around; a sad downgrade from Judith Anderson’s spellbinding performance in Hitchcock’s film. One gets the sense that Thomas wanted desperately to go full camp and lean far more heavily on the novel and original film’s famous queer subtext (the delicate finger caress that she and James exchange when Thomas hands her a fallen glove is the most sexually charged scene in a movie that mistakenly assumes Armie Hammer is its most attractive cast member), but was prevented from doing so by a script that seems suspiciously hell-bent on trying to strip away said subtext…and of course, insists on making Thomas act all dour and serious. When a movie made in 2020 and apparently trying to be progressive feels more uptight and conservative than a film made in 1940 under the surveillance of the Hayes Code, you’re doing something wrong. Maxim himself, also suggested by some book readers to be queer-coded and played by Laurence Olivier in the Hitchcock film, is straight through and through: not a big deal, but another instance where the writers could have done something interesting and chose not to.

Several other side characters receive the same treatment, and nobody apart from Thomas makes any lasting impression: not even Ann Dowd, who makes the least of what should have been her glorified cameo in the film – no thanks to the script, which has taken the funny, flirtatious character of Edythe Van Hopper and turned her into a grotesque, leering abuser who seems personally invested in trying to make her lady’s companion miserable: whether that’s by gaslighting her while the girl cries, locked inside her bedroom, or by amusing her equally wicked friends with stories of her awkward antics.

Rebecca
The superior version of Rebecca | telegraph.co.uk

Is there anything that redeems this Rebecca? I suppose the locations are very beautiful (though Manderley isn’t quite as lavish as one would want), and the costumes are all appropriately fashionable by modern standards. I have a bit of a hard time believing that our protagonist, who is meant to be shy and reserved, would be running around in big, baggy trousers in the late 1930’s, at a time when such a thing would still be considered eyebrow-raising if no longer totally scandalous, but it is what it is. It’s just more proof that director Ben Wheatley and Jane Goldman should not have been making a period piece, when it’s clear that wasn’t what they wanted to do.

Despite all this, I still hope that someone will someday make a better retelling of Rebecca, one that perhaps actually attempts to achieve something worthwhile and gay, and which maybe manages to finally capture throughout the haunting beauty promised by the novel’s famous opening, in which our heroine, ever the restless dreamer, revisits the ruined Manderley in her sleep…because this version’s attempts at tonal consistency are likely to haunt my nightmares.

Rating: 2/10