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This was a quiet weekend: I conquered a mountain of laundry and cleaned the oven, and we watched the first three delightfully batshit episodes of Britannia, a new big-budget drama from Sky which is supposedly set during the Roman invasion of Britain in 43 A.D. but might actually be about that time the police attacked some hippies at Stonehenge.
Apparently this will soon be available in the US on Amazon Prime.
Non-spoilery things you might want to know: it has a lot of violence. A LOT. Not a lot of sexual violence (one or two comments in the three episodes I have seen so far, which really pales next to all the actual throat cutting and flesh rending and general stabbing). A lot of the characters are on drugs. It is very funny, but the mood of the show swings from humour to horror without a lot of warning. Some kind of magic is definitely real. A lot of the acting is really good, especially David Morrissey as Aulus Plautius, the Roman commander, and Hugo Speer as Lucius, the camp prefect. They have a great buddy-cop thing going on. Other than that, don't get too attached to any of the Romans. Possibly, don't get attached to anyone. Pretty much nothing in this bears any relation to history, and it very clearly was not filmed in Kent.
Also, the Druids are really, really creepy in this. Horror movie creepy.
Of the actors, Eleanor Worthington Cox stands out as Cait, a girl whose tribe was massacred in episode 1, as does Nikolaj Lie Kaas, who plays the ex-Druid (?) Divis, who is on a mission from some unspecified god. (You can tell that they are hoping for the GoT audience because they went and got a guy called Nicolaj to be one of the co-stars.) So far the weak link for me is Kelly Reilly as Kerra, but her enormous wig and eyeliner tatoos may grow on me as it all goes on. Clearly I am supposed ot like her, but she hasn't done much to make me actually like her, and she is under the worst house arrest ever.
Apparently this will soon be available in the US on Amazon Prime.
Non-spoilery things you might want to know: it has a lot of violence. A LOT. Not a lot of sexual violence (one or two comments in the three episodes I have seen so far, which really pales next to all the actual throat cutting and flesh rending and general stabbing). A lot of the characters are on drugs. It is very funny, but the mood of the show swings from humour to horror without a lot of warning. Some kind of magic is definitely real. A lot of the acting is really good, especially David Morrissey as Aulus Plautius, the Roman commander, and Hugo Speer as Lucius, the camp prefect. They have a great buddy-cop thing going on. Other than that, don't get too attached to any of the Romans. Possibly, don't get attached to anyone. Pretty much nothing in this bears any relation to history, and it very clearly was not filmed in Kent.
Also, the Druids are really, really creepy in this. Horror movie creepy.
Of the actors, Eleanor Worthington Cox stands out as Cait, a girl whose tribe was massacred in episode 1, as does Nikolaj Lie Kaas, who plays the ex-Druid (?) Divis, who is on a mission from some unspecified god. (You can tell that they are hoping for the GoT audience because they went and got a guy called Nicolaj to be one of the co-stars.) So far the weak link for me is Kelly Reilly as Kerra, but her enormous wig and eyeliner tatoos may grow on me as it all goes on. Clearly I am supposed ot like her, but she hasn't done much to make me actually like her, and she is under the worst house arrest ever.
