I first read Archangel about 4 years ago and loved it. I've been waiting for the film ever since, imagine my delight when I heard it was coming to BBC1. And imagine my disappointment at how awful it turned out to be.
Robert Harris really has no luck with these things. First HBO slaughter Fatherland, and now the BBC destroy Archangel. This dramatisation had a lot of potential, Archangel would lend itself easily to the visual medium. I first suspected something might be wrong when Rapava was friendly and cuddly, rather than the drunken, bitter, sallow, nasty old man I remembered from the novel. The rest of the first half was fine, until Fluke left town with the wrong person. This was clearly a desperate attempt to create a romance that really wasn't necessary. It also made for an inexplicable moment early in the second part where Fluke gives one of his lectures on "not being able to understand Russia without understanding her past", not to the ignorant (and shockingly slim) American O'Brian (as it was meant to be), but to Zinaida.
It just went downhill exponentially from there. The drama of first encountering Josef was gone. The scenes delving into the man's psychopathic mind were glanced over. The revelation about the lost tourists passed over in a single sentence. The purging of his own guards lost altogether. The shootout was pathetic and lost all tension. They managed to keep the ending (vaguely) similar but it felt like it was thrown in as an after thought.
Skip this nonsense. Read the book.
Robert Harris really has no luck with these things. First HBO slaughter Fatherland, and now the BBC destroy Archangel. This dramatisation had a lot of potential, Archangel would lend itself easily to the visual medium. I first suspected something might be wrong when Rapava was friendly and cuddly, rather than the drunken, bitter, sallow, nasty old man I remembered from the novel. The rest of the first half was fine, until Fluke left town with the wrong person. This was clearly a desperate attempt to create a romance that really wasn't necessary. It also made for an inexplicable moment early in the second part where Fluke gives one of his lectures on "not being able to understand Russia without understanding her past", not to the ignorant (and shockingly slim) American O'Brian (as it was meant to be), but to Zinaida.
It just went downhill exponentially from there. The drama of first encountering Josef was gone. The scenes delving into the man's psychopathic mind were glanced over. The revelation about the lost tourists passed over in a single sentence. The purging of his own guards lost altogether. The shootout was pathetic and lost all tension. They managed to keep the ending (vaguely) similar but it felt like it was thrown in as an after thought.
Skip this nonsense. Read the book.