Review of The Swarm

I loved the book. This production gives me more abdominal pain than fish poisoning.

Not only is this shot terribly: Every scene is excessively static, worse than Disney's Volume.

(One comedic detail: People in close ups on boats and ships are CLEARLY in a studio, this looks worse than 90s b-movies.)

The production quality is backed by plain bad writing and editing.

Take the beginning of episode 4:

• The woman at the beach freaks out because of a crab: We see the crab crawling up her leg, she screams and jumps up - legit. Then the boyfriend calms her for 2 seconds and they continue smooching for 2 more seconds but she jumps up a second time, because I GUESS the crab returned or another crab crabbed up - which is not shown, so the sceen just looks off. Bad editing, and saving budget on cgi. Okay.

• Then the crab invasion (exvasion?) starts so both freak out, understandably. The crabs come pouring from the sea at a staggering slow walking speed. So the couple sprint to the motorbike, frantically trying to start it, of course it only starts at the last second, and they speed off at breakneck speed to escape the crabs waddling at 1 mph. A 5 second sequence that is shot like a chase follows, void of any sense of urgency. Then the guy hits the break FOR NO REASON so they of course crash the bike. We then see a stuntman with a totally different haircut and matching different-coloured pants fly through the air in a huge arc (comedy gold), cut to them landing .5 meters from the bike. Good God, this is insulting!

• We then return to one character who's friends have just drowned and because of her mourning she goes for a swim with another colleague. (Recurring them for her: Later when a tsunami hits and kills thousands she immediatly goes for a swim again, literally in the next scene. Terrible.)

• Next scene: This character meets with her mentor, both are devasteted and in utter shock because of the loss of the colleagues/students. The mentor was just at the phone with the parents of one of her dead students. They share a scene of silence, then our character turns to go, the mentor addresses her so she stops and turns and just has the weirdest little smile on her face (08:37) as if she just cracked an excellent joke - what is going on?!?

• Next scene doesn't add anything: The canadion characters are having a beer and one mentions that the government may be involved. Zero relevance. Doesn't matter then, won't matter in the future.

• Next scene is a video conference of the two french doctors with members of the government. The government experts (representatives?) sit in a tiny, badly lit conference room on cafeteria-quality chairs. And sure, they are the stereotypical-st idiots, the macho guy goes "you only SUSPECT that it will get worse" while the extras at the table try their best to distract from the guys performance (cringe). But they are finally swayed by the doctor's brilliant arguement "but you should". Terrible, terrible scene.

• Next scene is the french doctor, calling her family standing right next to the ocean that she just warned about. Oui, la mer.

• Next scene is that one and only science ship that our protagonist keeps teleporting to and from. It seems they keep station at the same coordinates for weeks, just waiting for the scientist to show up on the teleporter plattform. The robot operator sits is one of my favourits, he has been sitting at the same screen in the same clothes with the same expression for four episodes/a couple of weeks now. We, the audicence, are shown the sea floor - everyone is baffled, so I guess we should be, too, but I have no idea why.

• The next scene has two characters in the ship's corridor, the way they are framed they have a corridor going off in a strange angle right between them, so it looks like a split screen. Who is supervising this production??

• And I want to bring up the (!!BIGGEST SPOILER!!) tsunami in ep 5, because god, does the whole sequence fall flat. This is one of the highlight bits of the book, and I don't insist on special effects fireworks - but I demand build-up, suspense, drama! Nope, the big wave is suddenly there (at least we get two seconds of receeding sea level). And we get no sense about its scope (I vaguely remember an easily overheard radio bit about "a few coastal villages being destroyed, a few hundred people missing"); in the book it took half of Northern Europe; here it seems to mainly affect the protagonists who have lost their boy- & girlfriend #sad. But I understand that cgi costs money, which this production clearly lacks, so no blame there. The highlight of the sequence for me was that husband not waiting for two freaking seconds to pick up his wife who was arriving just few feet away when he took off. It looked hilarious. I almost threw my drink at the screen. Quality filmmaking.

Compared to this, Kenobi was good. There, I said it.