Monday, May 01, 2017

Fortitude

     A few weeks ago, I began watching Fortitude, a British-produced thriller set in a remote Norwegian village with a played-out coal mine, a growing scientific research center, ambitious eco-tourism hopes and an ongoing string of mysterious deaths, many if not all of them murders.

     It could have been a dull and claustrophobic set-piece.  It's marvelously not; instead, it plays like a collaboration between Michael Crichton and H. P. Lovecraft that had been produced by the team that made the first season of True Detective.

     While it has not yet managed quite the intensity of TD, it comes as close as anything I've seen; like the American program, the characters are well-realized, full of very real-seeming conflict and contradiction.  The backstory plays out in a series of partial glimpses, a little more every episode, in a manner at once natural and unnerving.  Eight and a half episodes in, there's plenty of conflict but still no clear sense of who to cheer on and who to hiss at.

     I'm enjoying it.

     ETA, 12 hours later: so I got to the end of the episode and kinda got icked out a couple of times.  But I'm still watching.

3 comments:

Monty James said...

True Detective was awesome; it would have taken some sort of dark rite to match the first series. Didn't watch it past the second episode of the second season.

This "Fortitude" of which you speak, is it on Amazon?

John in Philly said...

My wife and I agree and we are three quarters of the way through the second season.

Roberta X said...

Monty: Yes, Fortitude is on Amazon Prime Video. Sadly, American Gods is not and I am trying to decide if it's worth signing up for Starz to watch it.

John, they kept the level of story going into the second season? Good!