All the Show We Cannot Watch

It’s been a rough month for All The Light We Cannot See, the latest awards season offering from Netflix. Any hopes the streaming giant may have had for the epic war film becoming this year’s All Quiet on the Western Front withered when the adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Anthony Doerr opened at the Toronto International Film Festival to poor reviews. Too long for a film, too short for a series, and with genuinely awful sound mixing (keep the volume control handy), All The Light We Cannot See suffers from a lot of technical problems.

But that’s less the issue with the series than the matter of themes. All The Light We Cannot See centers around three characters, none of which are played by the big names of Hugh Laurie and Mark Ruffalo. Aria Mia Loberti plays Marie, a blind French girl who relays messages to allied forces in World War II from a well-hidden radio transmitter. Louis Hoffman plays Werner, a German boy from the borderlands with a talent for radio asked with triangulating her position. And Lars Eidinger plays Reinhold, a Nazi tasked with locating artifacts from the Museum of Natural History who becomes obsessed with the Sea of Flames as a means of defeating his terminal illness.

I happen to know all of this because I read the book. The Netflix version leaves a lot of this information surprisingly vague. Where Doerr discussed radio science to quite a bit of detail, explaining among other things why Marie is so difficult for the Nazis to find, the Netflix version simplifies this to Werner going to extreme lengths to protect Marie because the Nazis are just obsessively murdering literally everyone they find who has a radio. This rather begs the question of why Marie is bothering to relay her messages in a complex code based on Jules Verne novels in the first place.

In general perhaps the single most annoying change All The Light We Cannot See adaptation makes is that the Nazis are now so cartoonishly evil they’re impossible to take seriously. Although to be entirely honest I can’t blame the showrunners for trying. Several of the aforementioned negative reviews of this series are critical of the series depicting Werner as a good Nazi. Of course, in the book the fact that Werner is an orphan with limited educational opportunities is a fairly important part of his character. The novel is compelling reading in part because it treats all the Nazi ideology as background noise. Werner is for the most part able to ignore that, The Wind Rises style, because he’s able to focus so obsessively on radio work without dwelling too much on the actual purpose of this work.

Very, very briefly in the beginning, All The Light We Cannot See is able to capture the spirit of Werner’s character in a way the book doesn’t by having him listen to Marie’s broadcasts as a sort of coping mechanism. In the same way a teenager today might try to de-stress via parasocial reactions with his favorite YouTubers, Werner develops a crush on Marie as a girl who loves science just as much as he does, and is clearly a fan of The Professor’s broadcasts since she’s transmitting the same style of lectures on his same frequency.

But the movie just tells, rather than shows, us why The Professor is such a magical Carl Sagan-esque figure in this adaptation, which focuses far more on explosions than it does scientific inquiry. Indeed, Hugh Laurie’s Professor spends the bulk of his screentime discussing war stuff rather than the knowledge-as-therapy outlook he lives which actually makes him such a compelling character.

But neither of these are even the most dreadful changes the adaptation forces on characters in order to make them more screen-friendly. That honor goes to Reinhold, a repulsive character to be sure, but one with clear motivation. Reinhold is terrified of his imminent death, and becomes obsessed with obtaining the Sea of Flames because he thinks it will make him immortal. Without context, Reinhold sounds a little nuts. What the series fails to communicate is that pretty much every gemologist, including Marie’s father, played by Mark Ruffalo, clearly believes that the cursed immortality of the Sea of Flames is real, and the whole backstory of the Sea of Flames contributes heavily to the novel’s distinct vibe of highly superstitious scientists.

But the adaptation reduces the Sea of Flames to a mere McGuffin that needs to be protected because it belongs to France. This might leave viewers unfamiliar with the book a little confused as to why All The Light We Cannot See ends with Marie throwing the Sea of Flames into the ocean, an action that only makes sense in the context of the stone’s unexplained backstory. Most of the ending is quite bad, really, filled with the same war movie cliches that stripped the original story of its soul in the first three episodes. I can give the Netflix adaptation credit for getting rid of the epilogue, mainly because I really hated the book’s epilogue, but that’s really about as far as I can praise it.