Hacker Cinema
Reacher
2022 · TV series · 4 seasons
Created by Nick Santora
Jack Reacher, a veteran military police investigator, has just recently entered civilian life. Reacher is a drifter, carrying no phone and the barest of essentials as he travels the country and explores the nation he once served.
6 positive2 negative8 neutralfrom 16 commenters
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Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
16 comments on Hacker News
> Living in Vancouver ruins a lot of tv shows. Chicago? Nope, Vancouver. New York? Nope, Vancouver. SF? Nope, Vancouver!
Also Toronto / southern Ontario.
If you see a city scene and there's streetcar tracks, it was probably shot in Toronto. See opening shot of this scene in Reacher s02e04:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MQQrvYjdbQ
That list of movies is just the movies that Amazon Studios has been the distributor for via Prime Video. Amazon didn’t necessarily produce or fund all of the movies in that list. It’s a bunch of cheap movies that are likely meant to be loss leaders for Prime Video subscriptions, which is something that very much does fit the style of Amazon. Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV all have a similar list of D-tier garbage just to fill their catalogs.
On the contrary to your points, Amazon has put out some pretty solid and well received original series. The Boys, Gen V, Fallout, Reacher, Mr and Mrs Smith, Invincible, have all done really well if not been hits.
Games is pretty trash though. I think they’re also going for a loss leader strategy there, but the platform they’re trying to promote (Luna) just isn’t there.
Just to make sure we're on the same page here, this is the app that lets me move a highlighted rectangle using a controller with 300ms latency to select the next episode of Reacher, right?
>For any given thing or category of thing, a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing, but those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining everyone else's taste for that thing.
I think that's a self-dellusion many tech enthusiasts have, that they're somehow trend-setters.
And then the same enthusiasts say for the original iPod "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame", and see the masses jump to buy it, and themselves only catch up later.
Or they see the masses never caring for their e.g. desktop Linux, whose mass dominance (not mere "works for me" or "have set it up for my elderly parents and they don't even know it's not Windows") would come "any day now" for the last 30 years...
Trend-setters exist, but they're a different group than the "tiny minority" of enthusiasts. More like some musician paid to spot Beats headphones, or some cool dude sporting some gadget early on.
>For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into cars like those marques.
A hell of a lot of people had a real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, if they could have the chance. And even more admired Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches because of their design and elegance (and price, people aspire to luxury goods, even when they can't afford them), not because some sport-car afficionados said so.
It's the same in other areas: the popular books, or comics, or movies, or music, etc. are rarely if ever what the "inner" crowd of each niche admires. Most people buy Reacher and such, not Finnegan's Wake.
>So if you develop your product by following your analytics, you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's what the median user of any given service wants.
More likely, if you want to keep and continue increasing your margins, and your stock price, you'll incrementally continue to shit all over your product trying to squeeze ever more money.
Neither the "enthusiasts"/tech-savvy users NOR the "median user" wants Netflix to be the shit it has become, or Google search to be so fucked up, or ads and nags on Windows UI, and so on.
They're just given those, and they accept them having no recourse. The moment there's a better recourse, they jump to it (like IE -> Firefox -> Chrome, or BS early search engines -> Altavista -> Google).
Reacher's first season was good. Second season turned into a bad action movie. Bad writing, little time spent on characters/development while adding six new characters we were given no reason to know or care about.
It is legitimately too bad, they really had something with S1.
I don't think it's fair to judge how good a movie is based on how faithful it is to a book. They're different media entirely and you don't have time in a movie to get into the substance of a book. Movies usually leave fans of the original work disappointed, series are much better at that cause they can take the time to develop characters and go into multiple arcs. On a less philosophical example, Reacher is a good example to me of a movie that has nothing in common with the book apart from some names, and a series that is spot on.
On top of that, it's another piece of art. Directors should be allowed to provide an opinion. Take Verhoeven's adaptation of Starship troopers as an example, which is widely a critic of the source material. They're both different stories in their own right. I enjoy both of them differently, and I'm glad Verhoeven didn't go out of his way to relay the message that militaristic dictature is the way to go.
I just tried to watch season 2 of Reacher - the one with the steroid bodybuilder guy.
A good story may be hard but a bad story as bad as what I tried watching is not easy either. I am waiting to find out if this whole show was written by a ChatGPT instance fed cliches.
I noticed "Reacher (TV Series)" showed up. I guess we finally have a way to figure out what people are watching....
I quite enjoyed the first Reacher movie, so much so that the sequel was unexpectedly, jarringly bad.
Might give the series a quick squizz.
Reacher. Genuinely much better than the movie Reacher.
Per their email:
An update on Prime Video
Dear Prime member,
We are writing to you today about an upcoming change to your Prime Video experience. Starting January 29, Prime Video movies and TV shows will include limited advertisements. This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time. We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership. We will also offer a new ad-free option for an additional $2.99 per month* that you can sign up for here.
Prime is a very compelling value. Prime members enjoy a wide range of shopping, savings, and entertainment benefits, including:
More than 300 million items are available with free Prime shipping and tens of millions of the most popular items are available with free Same-Day or One-Day Delivery. Access to exclusive and broad streaming video content (including Prime Video exclusives like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, The Boys, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Citadel, The Wheel of Time, Reacher, and The Summer I Turned Pretty, as well as blockbuster movies such as Air, Creed III, Dungeons & Dragons, Candy Cane Lane with Eddie Murphy, and exclusive live sports including NFL Thursday Night Football). Access to Prime Video Channels, which provides an unmatched selection of subscription channels like Max, Paramount+ with SHOWTIME, BET+, MGM+, ViX+, Crunchyroll, PBS KIDS, NBA League Pass, MLB.TV, and STARZ—with no extra apps to download, and no cable required. Customers only pay for the ones they want, and can cancel anytime. The ability to use your Prime shopping benefits—like fast, free delivery, a seamless checkout experience, 24/7 live chat support, and hassle-free returns—on online stores beyond Amazon.com with Buy with Prime. Exclusive deals and shopping events like Prime Day. Ad-free listening of 100 million songs and millions of podcast episodes with Amazon Music. Prescription medications as low as $1 per month and fast, free shipping from Amazon Pharmacy. Access to unlimited eligible generic prescription medications for only $5 per month (including free shipping) with RxPass from Amazon Pharmacy. High-quality health care from One Medical for only $9 per month (or $99 annually), with the option to add up to five additional memberships for the family for only $6 per month (or $66 annually) each. Free two-hour Fresh grocery delivery on orders over $100 (and delivery charges between $6.95 to $9.95 for orders less than $100), and in-store savings on select groceries at Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market stores across the U.S. Unlimited photo storage with Amazon Photos. Gaming benefits with Prime Gaming. More than 3,000 books and magazines with Prime Reading. A free, one-year Grubhub+ membership trial valued at $120 per year, offering unlimited $0 delivery fees on orders over $12.
And, you can expect additional features and programs added in the future for our Prime members.
As mentioned above, no action is required from you. If you wish to sign up for the ad-free option, you can click here. And, as always, if you have questions about your Prime membership, you can manage your account here.
Thank you for being a valued member of Amazon Prime.
Sincerely, The Amazon Prime team
Ah I wondered where the Jack Reacher TV series was shot, mystery solved.
You might like Reacher https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9288030/
Sure — that’s why we’ve spent five years with terrible Star Wars and Marvel movies pandering to a niche audience.
But eventually the music stops and everyone leaves… which is what we’re seeing now:
Those companies haven’t produced quality within easy memory (5 years) and so people are overcoming their decades of inertia to find new properties.
You can look at the different receptions of Reacher and Terminal List versus Wheel of Time and Rings of Power, though, to see that putting The Message over quality doesn’t work.
> After Googling a bit, that Rippaverse thing seems like it's an opposite-polarity reaction, so it's still part of the problem.
You should listen to Rippa’s own description rather than the press around it:
He’s just trying to make a quality comic book, no explicit message.
That’s portrayed as “anti-woke” because not putting The Message front and center is a revolutionary act, these days.
One thing I appreciate Netflix for is atleast they are willing to do the bare minimum and give me 720p on Linux. I am also an Amazon Prime subscriber but Amazon is literally forcing me to pirate their shows because they refuse to serve more than 480p on Linux. Was trying to watch Jack Reacher last weekend and the quality was so bad that it was probably 360p, gave up after 3 episodes and ended up torrenting the season, which is a shame because I want to support shows I watch so they get more seasons.
In 2021 streamers should be supporting atleast 1080p for Linux but if they can't I can live with 720p like Netflix does, but serving 480p is just disrespectful and looks awful on any decent size modern monitor.
Pleasantly surprised to see Lee Child mentioned there.
The Enemy (mentioned in the list) is a prequel, though. But it is special in the sense that it is narrated in first person. Special because (no, not a spoiler): Reacher, the protagonist, doesn't say much, but the internal thinking is described in a very attractive way through out (so readers naturally long to hear in first person). The most common thing you read in the books is: "Reacher said nothing". Heck, it's so common that there's even a book written with that phrase as the title; it shadows the author, Lee Child, to investigate what it takes to make the popular character -- http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/529959/reacher-said-nothing-by-andy-martin/9781101965450/
FWIW, other books from the author I enjoyed and recommend: Echo Burning, Die Trying, Tripwire, Persuader. (/me fondly recalls reading 17+ books (even saving money as a student 10 years ago to pre-order) until a few years of years ago; will resist making a comment on the Reacher movies; but makes a sincere please to read the books first, and ignore, as best as you can, the movies).
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Related author: Robert Crais (characters: Elvis Cole and Joe Pike).