Hacker Cinema
The Last Kingdom
2015 · TV series · 60 min episodes · 5 seasons
Created by Stephen Butchard
A show of heroic deeds and epic battles with a thematic depth that embraces politics, religion, warfare, courage, love, loyalty and our universal search for identity. Combining real historical figures and events with fictional characters, it is the story of how a people combined their strength under one of the most iconic kings of history in order to reclaim their land for themselves and build a place they call home.
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14 comments on Hacker News
While I agree with Spielberg's realization that modifying his prior work was a mistake, there's something I would like to be able to do with movies as a consumer that I wish streaming services offered.
Hollywood seems obsessed with three things: Guns, sex and objectifying women.
While not every movie has guns, the sex and objectification is pretty much everywhere. Perfectly good movies have utterly unnecessary sex scenes that make them impossible to watch with kids. In some cases this is also uncomfortable in family gathering settings.
Two examples that come to mind (there are thousands):
Die Hard. He opens an office door, only to expose a couple having sex. Of course, the woman is fully exposed, while the guy is not.
Lucky Number Slevin. The main character walks into his apartment only to find his girlfriends on all fours on the bed having sex with a guy. Again, full sexual exploitation of the woman, of course.
The Last Kingdom (series): Once again, sex everywhere. No value whatsoever to the story. It's a great series. Unwatchable with kids and in other settings.
Battlestar Galactica (the one with James Olmos): Excellent series. Sex everywhere. No nudity that I can remember, yet scenes of oral sex and other forms of sex without showing full body nudes. Fucking unbelievably unnecessary.
Outlander (series): Might as well be labelled porn. It's a sex-fest. Humping in any way possible at any possible time and even male-to-male rape. Nothing whatsoever to add to the story, which would have been amazing without all that shit in there.
The Queens Gambit (series). Fantastic series about chess. My kids are really into chess. Fuck if we are going to watch it with them. No nudity, yet drugs and sex are featured. The character is fictitious, which means there was no need for any of it. The producers just wanted to include sex and drugs. This one can't be fixed. I am not going to watch a show with my kids that implies taking drugs can make you smarter in any way.
There are tons of movies and shows with similar problems. Movies that are excellent and yet the producers feel it is necessary to insert a stupid sex scene that adds absolutely nothing to the story and is of no value whatsoever other than to show boobs bouncing and feature women as sexual objects.
Notice I did not say anything about movies like Fifty Shades or Gray, Wall Street or Eyes Wide Shut. Those are movies where the story justifies some of what they feature. There could be an argument related to female objectification, that's about it.
I am not a puritan, by any means. I just think this is stupid, wrong, unnecessary, detrimental and destructive to women. Having a daughter changes your perspective on what's out there in popular culture. Great movies and series are being ruined all the time by inserting sex where it is unnecessary, and it is usually at the expense of women.
Getting back to the first paragraph. I wish there was a setting on streaming services to be able to watch these movies with those scenes cut out or replaced by alternative scenes shot and chosen by the creators.
In the case of Die Hard, the couple could be kissing, taking a nap, playing chess...anything. The point is they were distracted and did not react to the emergency. In the case of Slevin, the sex scene could either be completely cut out or replaced with something different.
That, to me, would be a feature very much worth having. Hollywood's obsession with sex and the objectification of women is a problem that does not seem to receive the attention it should.
This has been noticeable, companies are trying to hire translators en-masse, often low quality ones with shitty pay.
Lately I am seeing more and more media with absolutely awful translations, not just streaming, but games and whatnot too.
Things we have now:
1. Serious translation studios that hired several political activists that will happily butcher the original script to fit their worldview.
2. A ton of freelancer translations that work for low pay, often fixing machine-translated scritps, and do a crap job overall.
3. More serious translators but that don't have time and pay to actually know what the subject is about so they just plop down a more literal translation, often with weird results as words with multiple possible translation might end with the version that makes no sense in the context.
Some exmaples past few weeks from what I saw in media:
1. more than once I saw media that the translation was forcibly shifted toward left-wing politics OR had all sexual references removed and/or towned down, sometimes both.
2. I saw both games, movies and series released recently that not only had the usual errors, but had outright missing letters, mojibake (yep! never expected to see mojibake in modern media, how people make that mistake?), phrases that someone obviously pasted from another document but selected it wrong and thus is missing parts of it and so on.
3. Was watching "Last Kingdom" yesterday, noticed translators weren't sure how to translate some things and in each episode the translation of some specific words or phrases changed, sometimes more literal, sometimes less, but wildly inconsistant.
Likewise, The Last Kingdom TV show covers these characters probably even more - Æthelflæd is in all 5 seasons [1] (although season 5 isn't out yet), and there's a lot of focus on Mercia.
[1] https://the-last-kingdom.fandom.com/wiki/%C3%86thelfl%C3%A6d
Edit: Should have hit refresh rather than browse tabs opened a while ago...err, I agree with dave333
Absolutely. Hell, how many people self taught themselves the real life influences of Game of Thrones, Vikings, the Last Kingdom, Master and Commander, etc? Sure, not everyone, but I bet theres a bigger history enthusiast demographic because of certain shows, movies and books. I dont think a bigger demographic of history enthusiasts is bad for a society.
The depiction of medieval folks wearing drab and dirty and torn clothes in black, browns, and and grays is THE biggest peeve I have with costume design in ‘historical’ movies and tv shows. The absolute worst offenders in recent memory being Vikings and The Last Kingdom, but there are a plethora of others. Not to mention the biker-gear-leather-fetish as armor look they all seem to go for.
The series "The Last Kingdom" is based on the books by Bernard Cornwell. He also wrote the "Sharpe" books, which were adapted to several TV films (starring Sean Bean). They're set around the Napoleonic Wars, with some of them in India.
Between the TV shows Vikings and The Last Kingdom this period has had some welcome screen time in recent years. It's a fascinating era in British history and it's great to see it getting more popular attention.
The Last Kingdom by Netflix is a must watch for everyone who still have questions about Anglo-Saxons
I was expecting to hate this show but I ended up enjoying it. Even more than what I my highest possible expectations gave me.
There's an episode in the Last Kingdom and in Vikings when we see the great pyres lit to communicate a raid was occurring. There's quite a few on the coast of North Eastern England where I grew up still present to this day.
Admittedly I some what doubt they're original .
you make him sound like Uhtred in Last Kingdom season 1, returning home to find his chief servant pilfering from his land, prompting him to leap off from his horse and plunge a sword through his heart ("now THAT ... is justice!" Uhtred boasts to his horrified wife). perhaps 'feudal kingdom' was a bit over the top?
This is a useful tool for determining if a streaming service has any movies you want to watch:
https://flickmetrix.com/
But no. Netflix's value seems to be in its original shows. So, if they come out with a new season show I'm interested in, such as The Last Kingdom, they can have my subscription for the month. The trend of show seasons becoming progressively worse, a la House of Cards, should be a concern for them.
Disney+ is really going to give them a challenge once it is available.
British shows mostly go the other way. All the classics seem to be one or two series where you wish they'd made one or two more, and series are often 6 or 8 episodes rather than the 10, 12 or "bleeding ridiculous" US series love. As our tv has got more American in style and business we've gained series that just won't die, even though so far past expiry date the corpse is rotting. (Big Brother? Apprentice? Celebrity anything...
The only downside to the shorter seasons is book adaptations often go at breakneck pace and take too many liberties.
As example, The Last Kingdom: First two series were BBC America and 8 episodes that covered 2 books a series. Pretty damn good adaption, pretty faithful to the books even with the brutal fast pace compression, and kept the real historical basis Cornwell is famous for. Maybe a bit tame and a little too "worthy" in places. It's King Alfred christianising early England and killing many heathen Danes, some "worthy" was unavoidable. :)
Third season is Netflix and no BBC, so instant 10 episodes a series, and it's unbelievably fucking shit. The gore, the dialogue, budget and plot all got turned up to 11, all the characters got entirely new personalities and the basis on the books got thrown out the window. Yet it drags and drags, because the highlights are constant now, so no contrast any more. Cornwell's famous historical basis laughed at and pissed on. Shark jumped multiple times. In wanting to make it more showy and mass market they killed any interest of the people who did watch it.
Another reason to think my Netflix sub is nearing its end.
Those examples should credit Ford and Subway as director. :)
I'm the same. The Netflix version of Black Mirror loses so much impact from the addition of 20 mins of dead filler.
Don't forget overly long and overblown fight and chase scenes that all movies must now have. They just bore me senseless. The first one I saw was fun, probably Blues Brothers, but even back then they were taking the mickey. Never the choreography and humour of Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan. Nowadays at home when a movie starts a fight against the hero, or the car (spaceship) chase I tend to do something else for 5.
Breaking Bad was the best series to come out the US in ages. Even they lost the plot with the insanely long shootout with infinite ammo and insanely bad marksmanship. Thankfully that was a one off so very easy to forgive. :)
Brit series go too far the other way and cram far too much into too few episodes. I've been enjoying Last Kingdom but boy are they spoiling it by cramming two books into every season, with fewer episodes per series compared to the US average.
> So lots of people internationally who would watch it on Netflix will be pirating it.
Unfortunately that's what I have to resort to at the moment. I'm in Australia, and The Expanse is a marvellous series. I watched the first episode of the first series on Netflix when I couldn't find anything else to watch - I then binge-watched the entire first series at that point.
Now that the second series is out, I am back to good ol' pirating each episode as they air in the United States, as there is no other way to obtain it. And because of this, Netflix will unfortunately miss out on me binge watching the second series on their platform and won't get the viewership / statistics for it because I would've already seen it.
Why can they not do what they're doing for The Last Kingdom, another show I discovered on Netflix and subsequently love, and air the episodes in a weekly fashion as soon as they air in the producers domestic market?
Oh well, their loss. And likely ours when the series will inevitably get cancelled due to "lack of viewership" :-(