The book-to-series adaptation trend has had uneven results in 2023. Some, like Lessons in Chemistry and The Other Black Girl, engage unsuspecting audiences and delight critics with creative alterations and faithful depictions of their source material, and extended shows with rave reviews dominate streaming services as well (Heartstopper, Slow Horses, and Dark Winds, to name a few). Others, however, utterly miss conveying the meaning behind the text, and All the Light We Cannot See is one of this year’s most egregious examples of this.
All the Light We Cannot See Synopsis
During WWII’s violent peak of war waging, a blind French girl encounters a young German soldier who fights for the Nazis against his will. Through the girl’s attempt to use a nightly broadcast to find her family members and the boy’s skills at radio frequency detection, their paths fatefully collide.
The Recognizable, Uneven Works of Steven Knight
Screenwriter and occasional director Steven Knight first became internationally famous from Eastern Promises, his script directed by David Cronenberg in 2007. Since then, his TV series Peaky Blinders made him a staple of streaming. Many films and shows later, Knight still receives frequent praise due to films like Pawn Sacrifice, Locke, Woman Walks Ahead, and Spencer. Like most prolific filmmakers, Knight has hits, but as his career progresses, his lesser side has begun to drag down the successes.
In the 2020s, Knight has been on a kick with miniseries, but each ends up worse than the last. Adaptations of A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations drifted into needlessly dark, tonally mismatched posturing, and his recent Netflix series All the Light We Cannot See makes some of his worst errors in years. With all four episodes written by Knight and directed by Shawn Levy, the constant clichés and banality in this book adaptation make it one of the most unfortunate viewing experiences of the year.
Nell Sutton and Mark Ruffalo in ‘All the Light We Cannot See’
The Great Misfires of All the Light We Cannot See
A far cry from the U.S.A vs. Germany shoot-’em-ups and shock-value, mostly fake Nazi horrors of decades past, we often see modern media carefully consider its treatment of fictional WWII tales. After all, even the Oscar-winning film Jojo Rabbit received its fair dose of criticism for balancing humor and seriousness when portraying Nazi atrocities.
The root of All the Light We Cannot See‘s problems stems from Knight and Levy’s collective disregard for that sentiment; the series is thus laden with crude melodrama dialogue, over-stylized action sequences, hokey villains, and a complete inability to land the thematic weight of the source material. While these two are mostly to blame, the actors often do not help, delivering the lines with over-the-top fraudulence that instantly betrays the lack of depth in the script.
In 2023, watching a film that abounds in self-seriousness where everyone seems to collectively forget the sensitivity required for discussing this period is astounding and cringe-inducing. Like Knight’s other lesser adaptations, All the Light We Cannot See lacks the proper amount of nuanced characters, where not even the transcendent performances could have saved the dialogue. Combined with too many eye-roll moments and a complete absence of intellectual stimulation, this will be the best show to skip this month in favor of the book.
All the Light We Cannot See is streaming now on Netflix.