All the Light We Cannot See (2023)

 

            “All the Light We Cannot See” is a Netflix limited series of four episodes.  It is based on the novel by Anthony Doerr.  He spent ten years on the book, much of it on research.  The book was a best-seller that sold $15 million copies.  It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  The series was directed by Shawn Levy.  It is his first foray into the war genre.  The movie is set in the siege of Saint-Malo in 1944.  It was filmed in English although there are no American or British characters.

            The series gets off to a blazing start by using CGI B-24s to bombard Saint-Malo at night.  (Kudos for using Liberators over the cinematic darling B-17s.)  The citizens are warned to evacuate because the city is going to be assaulted.  Unfortunately, the Germans have locked the gates to the city.  Marie-Laure Leblanc (Aria Mia Loberti) is in an attic reading a book for a radio broadcast.  She is blind.  A German soldier in the city is listening.  Werner Pfennig (Louis Hoffman) locates clandestine radio broadcasts and receivers.  Previous to this he had been stationed on the Eastern Front and he had been forced to participate in the killing of civilians.  He is not interested in locating Marie-Laure because he enjoys her broadcasts and when he was in the orphanage he would listen to a professor who broadcast on the same frequency.  There is an evil Nazi named von Rumpel (Lars Eldinger)  who is also looking for Marie-Laure.  He is a gem-finder who works for Hitler, but in this case he is working for himself.  He believes a diamond belonging to the Paris Museum of Natural History is in her possession because her father Daniel (Mark Ruffalo) worked there.  “The Sea of Flames” is supposedly cursed.  Anyone touching it will have something bad happen to a loved one.  But it will also make the person owning it immortal.  There is a second evil Nazi named Muller (Jacob Diehl) who is using Werner to locate the woman making the broadcasts.  When they find her, Werner will be forced to shoot her

            The series is nonlinear (like the book) with one thread covering Marie-Laure and her father from the invasion of France to the siege of Saint-Malo.  When the Germans came to Paris, Daniel took the diamond and he and Marie-Laure went into hiding in Saint-Malo.  The other thread gives us Werner’s story.  At the orphanage he proved to be a whiz with radios.  When the Nazis learned this, he was taken to radio school.  It was worse than a boot camp.  The flashbacks are chronological, so don’t worry about being confused.  The movie is more like a Hallmark movie than a sci-fi movie.  Marie-Laure and Werner are connected by their love for the professor’s cerebral broadcasts.  In some of his broadcasts, he talks about “all the light we cannot see” referring to things that are not obvious to the human eye.  This is meaningful to Marie-Laure because of her blindness and Werner is hoping there is a bright side to his stay in the orphanage and his military career.

            “All the Light You Cannot See” is definitely in the war genre, so I am reviewing it as such.  Normally, I make this statement to justify calling a war movie bad, despite mainstream critics lauding the film.  There is a different criteria for my reviews than what a movie critic would have.  I value aspects like accuracy and realism which may not be on their radar.  In the case of this movie, my problem is not with the critics.  The movie has a 25% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  My conflict is with Netflix viewers who love the series.  They include my wife.

            The movie got off to a bad start with me when the B-24s bomb the city at night.  I tried to check to see if there were any exceptions to the RAF bombing at night and the US 8^th Air Force bombing in daylight.  I could not find any.  Compound this with leaflets telling the civilians (and the Germans) that there would be a raid the next night.  That’s right, we’re coming back, so get your anti-aircraft guns ready.  Clearly the bombing was done at night for visual effects.  You don’t get cool tracers in daylight.  The leaflets were inserted to get a clock ticking.  That’s entertainment!  I was also skeptical about the depiction of the city as being untouched by the war except for scenes when the war intrudes.  Other than two air strikes, no shots are fired.  My research found that this was far from reality.  (See my historical accuracy below.)  Speaking of reality, there is a lack of it throughout.  Much of it to drive the plot.  The diamond curses people that touch it to add mysticism to counter the lauding of science.  And the irony of Marie-Laure’s blindness.  Then it throws in the immortality feature to add the occult and justify von Rumpel’s quest.  I do not mind the small world aspects like Marie-Laure and Werner bonding over the professor broadcasts.  That’s not realistic, but it’s necessary.  What were unnecessary are the other head-scratchers like Werner’s brutal radio school experience.  Nazi’s are so evil, they treat radio school students like they are joining the SS!  Marie-Laure’s broadcasts of chapers from Jules Verne’s “”20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” are coded to aid the air bombardment!

 

            The cast is a strength.  It includes Ruffalo and Hugh Laurie as Marie-Laure’s uncle Etienne who is in the Resistance.  Uncle Etienne has a secret that is integral to the plot and adds an air of mystery to go with the romance.  A romance that does not come to fruition until the last act, so stick around.  Loberti and Hoffman have some chemistry and both are fine as young people attempting to navigate the horrors of war while maintaining their morality.  This is easier for Marie-Laure because she is her father’s daughter.  He’s a museum director who risks his life for an artifact and builds a tabletop model of Saint-Lo to help his daughter navigate the streets.  The acorn does not fall far from the tree.  Loberti is excellent as the feisty intellectual.  She is actually blind, as is Nell Sutton who plays the young Marie-Laure.  Hoffman is good as the orphan who is not corrupted by his training and his experience on the Eastern Front.  He is believable as the rare German soldier who came out of Russia unbroken in body and spirit.  His actions in protecting the girl on the radio are extremely risky, but love is powerful.  Or is it love of radio broadcasts?

            I have not read the novel yet, so I can not say whether the accuracy problems were from the screen play or the book.  I hope they don’t appear in the book because if Doerr did a lot of research, it does not show.  Saint-Malo is a port in Brittany, France.  It was designated a fortress as part of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall.  The fact that it still had its medieval wall made it an obvious choice.  General Patton’s Third Army was tasked with taking the province of Brittany and its ports.  Patton felt Saint-Malo was not worth the cost, but he was overruled by Omar Bradley.  Patton turned out to be right.  (When the city fell, it was discovered that the port had been disabled to where it was useless.  Sorry, GIs and building owners.)  The city was held by many more Germans than intelligence predicted, so it was a tough nut to crack.  The battle began on August 4.  It included air and artillery bombardment that left most of the buildings destroyed.  On August 5, the German commander allowed all civilians to evacuate the city.  The gates were not locked.  It’s a good thing most left.  It seems unlikely that Marie-Laure’s friends would have let her stay.  The city was aflame for the next week with the Germans forbidding the fighting of fires.  Meanwhile, American forces were assaulting the city in bitter urban combat.  The movie does not even imply this.  The city fell on August 17 after continuous fighting.  When the Americans arrive at the end of the series, it seems like they took the city just because it was bombed twice.

            I have to admit that the brutal critic reviews of  “All the Light We Cannot See” surprises me.  It is a well-crafted crowd-pleaser.  I assume (because I never read critic reviews before writing mine) that they found the series to be trite and manipulative.  I am not surprised it is popular because it aimed at a general audience, not an audience of war movie lovers (although I know some war movie fans who enjoyed it.)  My personal dislike of it is mainly based on the aggravating little and big details that challenge history and reality.  I hope that when I read the book, I am left wondering why the series was such a misfire.

GRADE  =  C