World Without End (2012)

The absolute worst! Whoever decided to air this drivel should be drawn and quartered, and yes I read the book and this is a massacre of it! How this ever got aired could only be a case of nepotism or outright sabotage. I am at a loss to come up with words to decry this utter garbage, I feel sorry for the actors who had to put up with this utter crap.

I was intrigued by the first 15 minutes of the first episode, watched the rest and was disappointed. The plot moves so quickly with no character building what soever and the characters are so one dimensional. Caris is married to an abusive man in 30 seconds and then 1 minute later is raped and then he leaves her 2 minutes... and she seems to be unmarred by the horrific events - seriously? The men are either sexually perverse or chivalrous and there seems to be no redeeming quality to anyone that is bad. You either hate them or love them, you cannot be unsure of them. Let's not speak about all the historical inaccuracies. In fairness, the costumes and sets are brilliant and the casting is great. But I couldn't get past the second episode without turning it off.

If you have not read the book, you may enjoy this movie. However, like most Jane Austen fans, if you are a Ken Follett fan, you require only two things in turning books into movies: 1) an attempt at accuracy with plots/characters, 2) changes that only ENHANCE the movie. Sadly, this does neither. The characters are changed. The plot is changed. I am wondering throughout series if why Ken Follett didn't sue them for using the name of the book as that was the only thing that remained unchanged. This movie is a poor man's Ken Follett novel. This is the tootsie roll that you eat last after you have eaten good Halloween candy. This is the person who thinks since dirt looks like cocoa powder, he can use dirt to make brownies. This my friend is dirt in brownies. I am a little sad and confused that they would even use the title of the book if they planned to use nothing else. Also, there seemed to be a campaign to make the movie as horrible as possible. However, I am still watching and addicted. My goals is to see how bad a job they did. I may write another review.

This feature may have been close to reality in terms of the brutal nature of these dark times, but sometimes it was very difficult to watch. One of the most disappointing aspects of the story were the inability of some of the characters (Ralph, Godwyn for example) never came around. I had hopes that they would somehow change, but they started evil and remained so - and maybe that's typical of these times, but the lines between good and evil were so clearly drawn. Throughout the whole series, there's this great sense of impending doom comes about with the abuse of power by the Queen, the would be King, the Bishop and the Earl. There's a sense of hopelessness that nothing good can come of all this. The ending just gives a brief sense of hope, but it's not fleshed out at all. In general it's a very dark depiction of that ancient time. i only watched all the way to the end to see if there was a ray of light at the end of the tunnel.