The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20231104134514/https://www.metacritic.com/tv/all-the-light-we-cannot-see/
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2023
TV-MA
Netflix
2023
TV-MA
Netflix
SummaryDuring World War II, the journeys of blind French teenager Marie-Laure LeBlanc (Aria Mia Loberti) and German soldier Werner Pfennig (Louis Hofmann) cross in Shawn Levy's four-part limited series based on Anthony Doerr's novel of the same name.
SummaryDuring World War II, the journeys of blind French teenager Marie-Laure LeBlanc (Aria Mia Loberti) and German soldier Werner Pfennig (Louis Hofmann) cross in Shawn Levy's four-part limited series based on Anthony Doerr's novel of the same name.
It’s worth watching for Loberti’s outstanding performance and the generally impressive production value, but it’s clear that it could have been so much more.
As a storyteller, Doerr is a master at weaving all these threads and elements together while giving us more nuanced characters, but in this well-intentioned production the stitching and seams that we can see all too often.
There are melodramatic excesses — primarily involving a rotating cast of variously rabid Nazi officers — and convenient lapses of logic, but there is an overall level of restraint and wit in Knight’s screenplay that keeps “All the Light” from tilting completely over into shamelessness. If you are amenable to being manipulated in the service of an emotional workout, you probably won’t feel bad in the morning.
The show could be forgiven some shonkiness and self-indulgence if the central chemistry between Marie and Werner was coherent. But the achronological telling wreaks havoc with their relationship, and the German soldier is relegated to a footnote. What’s left is a cartoonish portrait of a Nazi in pursuit of a blind girl’s diamond, which does little credit to the sheer scale of suffering endured in both our recent history and the contemporary moment.
All the Light We Cannot See is visually impressive and can feel like a movie in places, with its glossy production. But, unfortunately, the quality desperately lacks in other places such as the convincing writing of these characters and their four-episode arcs.
Nothing about this final product suggests that Levy or Knight was the right choice to bring this story to the screen. Their vision for Doerr's novel is shallow, messy, and, most unfortunately, instantly forgettable.
A ghastly failure. The glossy adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name flattens morally ambiguous characters into two-dimensional avatars of pure good and absolute evil.
