Shawn Levy’s All the Light We Cannot See fumbles in darkness

The Spool / Reviews

Netflix's attempt to adapt the well-received novel will make viewers wonder why they bothered.

Similar3 Body Problem A Dance to the Music of Time, A Fortunate Life, A Gentleman in Moscow, A League of Nobleman, A Little Princess, A Menina Sem Qualidades, A Model Family, A Native of Beijing in New York, A Respectable Trade, A River Runs Through It, A Shop for Killers, A Storm for Christmas, A Touch of Frost, A Very English Scandal, A Year in the Life, A.D. The Bible Continues, A2Z, About a Boy, Addicted Heroin, Advokát ex offo, Aftershock: Earthquake in New York, Agatha Christie's Poirot Alexandr Dumas starší, Alias Grace, Alif Allah Aur Insaan, All or Nothing at All, Amnesia, Anatomy of a Scandal, And Then There was One Yuriko, Animated Classics of Japanese Literature, Anna Karenina, Annika, Anxious People, Arn: The Knight Templar, Arthur Hailey's The Moneychangers, As Beautiful As You, Ash, Aspen, Återkomsten, Atomic Train, Babel, Backstrom, Barbora Rösselová, Battle for Happiness, Be with You, Beach Girls, Behind the Revenge, Best Choice Ever, Better Man, Between Us, Beulah Land, Bitter Blood, Black Beauty, Black Narcissus, Black Raven, Blackeyes, Blackwater, Bleak House, Blossoms Shanghai, Bobby Kennedy for President, Bodies Boogiepop and Others, Boys from the Blackstuff, Brand New Cherry Flavor, Brass Dreams, Brides of Christ, Buang Ruk Satan, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?, Candy, Captains and the Kings, Celebrity, Chaser Game, Chicken Nugget, Choice Husband, Christopher Columbus, Cigarette Girl, Clayhanger, Cleopatra, Cliffs of Each, Close Relations, Club Friday the Series 14: Love & Belief, Code of a Killer, Cold Courage, Conquistadores: Adventum, Cooking Crush, Copenhagen Cowboy, CrimeTube SouthTyrol, Culpa - No One Is Innocent, Cyclone Tracy, DAHMER - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, Dancing on the Edge, Dangerous Liaisons, Dark Winds, Dash & Lily, David: Story of David, Dead Head, Dead Ringers, Death of a Pilgrim, Deep Night, Deliver Me, Detective Forst, Devil in Ohio, Dexter Die Diplomatin, Die Patriarchin, Die Wölfe, Disclaimer, Don't Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves, Driven, East of Eden, Echoes, Eclipse of the Heart, Elizabeth R, Emerald City, Emily of New Moon, Eric, Eternity Shinya no Nurekoi Channel, Evergreen, Evlerden Biri, Fabio Montale, Faith, Fallen Faraway Downs, Fearless Felipe y Letizia, Finland Papa, First Kill, Five Days at Memorial, Fool Me Once Fosse/Verdon, From Scratch, Full Circle, Further Tales of the City, G.B.H., Game of Thrones Genesis, George & Tammy, Golden Years Good Life: Thank You, Papa, Goodbye, Good Morning Children, Gossip Girl Griselda, Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones, Harlan Coben's Shelter, He's Into Her, Heidi, Hello Anne: Before Green Gables, Henry and Anne: The Lovers Who Changed History, Herzogpark, Higehiro: After Being Rejected, I Shaved and Took in a High School Runaway, Houdini, House of Cards, Howards End, I Feel You Linger in the Air, I Just Want To See You, I Know My First Name Is Steven, I Know What You Did Last Summer, If Tomorrow Comes, Informa, Insect Totem, Intrusion, Island at War, Jack the Ripper, Jane Eyre, Järnvägshotellet, Jekyll, Jesus, Jewels, JFK: Reckless Youth, Joseph Balsamo, Kakuriyo -Bed & Breakfast for Spirits-, Kamen Rider Black Sun, Kamen Rider Jeanne & Kamen Rider Aguilera with Girls Remix, Kamen Rider Outsiders Kamenskaya, Kamenskaya - 5, Kamenskaya - 6, Kiri, Kiss Me First, Kiss Sixth Sense, Kita Yoshio's Tomorrow, Korea-Khitan War, Kronika, Krupp: A Family Between War and Peace, Kübra, Kungamordet, L'amaro caso della Baronessa di Carini, La Chambre des dames, La Cloche tibétaine, La vida simplemente, Lady Chatterley, Lakeside Murders, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Les Misérables, Lies Hidden in My Garden, Life as a Girl, Life of Shakespeare, Little Birds, Little Tragedies, Little Women Lives of the Saints, Long Time No See, Love Between Fairy and Devil, Love Like the Galaxy, Love Sea, Love Syndrome III, Love You Just as You Are, Lucky Hank, M*A*S*H Made for Love, Magpie Murders, MALICE, Marco Polo, Master of the Game, Mayfair Witches, Medical Examiner Dr. Qin: The Survivor, Meet You at the Blossom, Meeting You Loving You, Memorial de Maria Moura, Midsummer Night, MIGNON, Million Dollar Babies, MIOKA –MY LAST DAYS WITH YOU–, Miracle Workers, Moeder, waarom leven wij?, Monarch of the Glen Monsieur Spade, More Than Words, Mosaic, MosGaz. Delo N1, Mother Is Wrong, Mr. Mercedes, My Beautiful Man, My Fantastic Mrs Right, My Gear and Your Gown, My Hero Series, My Lovely Boxer, My Only 12%, My Ride, My Secret Love, My Stand-In, Nacht der Frauen, Nancherrow, Narco-Saints, New Amsterdam, Nice Work, Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King, Noah's Ark, Nothing Remains the Same, Number Woman Gye Sook Ja, Olivia Twist, On Marriage, One Step Toward Freedom, One Trillion Dollars, Open Your Eyes, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Os Maias, Our Secret, Pachinko, Paint with Love, Pälzisch im Abgang, Pandora's Clock, Paper Giants: Magazine Wars, Parizaad, Partner Track, Patria, Paul Gauguin, Pennyworth: The Origin of Batman's Butler, Per amore del mio popolo, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Perfect Love, Perfect Murder, Perfect Town: JonBenét and the City of Boulder, Perry Mason, Peter and Paul, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Piece of Cake, Place of Execution, Planet of the Apes Platform 7, Polisen i Strömstad, Pompeii, Pope John Paul II, Portrét Doriana Graya, Power Rangers Dino Force Brave, Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story, Pride and Prejudice Prima sezóna, Prípad jasnovidca Hanussena, Prom Pissawat, Quatermass II, Queer as Folk, Rage of Angels, Ramon y Cajal, Reacher, Rebus Rencana Besar, Resurrection, Reverse 4 You, Ridley, Rivals, Rivals Forever - The Sneaker Battle, Ronja the Robber's Daughter, Roswell Rough Cut, RUSH: Inspired by Battlefield, Saint X, Scrublands, Scully Scumbag System, Seven Seconds, Seventh Avenue, Shangri-La, Shardlake, She, Sherlock Holmes Shining Girls, Sinking Spring, Six Survivors, Ski into Love, Someone Has to Die, Son of the Morning Star, Song of the Moon, Soul Land, Soul Land 2: The Peerless Tang Clan, Spies of Warsaw, Station Eleven, Stavy rachotí, Stranded, Strangers and Brothers, Studs Lonigan, Super Pumped, Supernova, Svadba bez nevesty, Sweet Magnolias, Sweetbitter, Sweetpea, Tajný agent, Taken, Takin' Over the Asylum, Tales from the Neverending Story Tales of the South Seas, Tamas, Tauno Tukevan sota, Tempted, Tender Is the Night, Thai Cave Rescue, The 100, The Amazing Grace of Σ, The Baxters, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, The Bequeathed, The Blood of Youth, The Bourne Identity The Brothers Karamazov, The Buccaneers, The Camomile Lawn, The Chestnut Man, The Cicada's Eighth Day, The Count of Monte-Cristo: Great Revenge, The Couple Next Door, The Day of the Triffids, The Debt, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Edwardians, The Emperor's Strategy, The End of Love, The Fabulous, The Far Pavilions, The Final Cut, The Fire Next Time, The First Olympics: Athens 1896, The Flatshare, The Forest of Love: Deep Cut, The Fox's Summer, The French Atlantic Affair, The Frog, The Genius of Mozart, The Girls on the Bus, The Gold, The Gold Robbers, The Gravy Train Goes East, The Haunting of Bly Manor, The High School Heroes, The House in the Woods, The Ice House, The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, The Interest of Love, The Invisible Man, The Irrational, The Journalist, The Journey of Chongzi, The Jungle, The Killing Kind, The Last Convertible, The Leftovers, The Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These, The Little Drummer Girl, The Long Night, The Lost World The Loyal Pin, The Lørenskog Disappearance, The Lying Life of Adults, The Many Faces of Ito, The Master and Margarita, The Middleman's Love, The Midwich Cuckoos, The Moon Embracing the Sun, The Murders, The Mysterious Benedict Society, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, The Night Agent, The Night Sister, The Ordinary World, The Other Black Girl, The Passage, The Patient, The Perfect Couple, The Phantom of the Opera, The Pilot's Love Song, The Playlist, The Plot Against America, The Prey, The Quatermass Experiment, The Rainbow, The Red Sleeve, The Regime, The Return of the Condor Heroes, The Rhinemann Exchange, The Rotters' Club, The Secrets of Lake Success, The Serial Killer's Wife, The Shadow Line, The Shining The Sign, The Singing Detective, The Sleuth of Ming Dynasty, The Spider, The Story of Park's Marriage Contract, The Strain, The Sun Also Rises, The Sympathizer, The Tatami Time Machine Blues, The Three-Body Problem, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, The Tyrant, The Undoing, The Vanishing Triangle, The Whirlwind, The Wimbledon Poisoner, The Witness for the Prosecution, The Woods, The Word, There Will Be People, Three Days of Christmas, Three Women, Through the Darkness Tientsin Mystic, Tiger Lily, 4 femmes dans la vie, Till The End of The Moon, Tira, To Kill a Cop, Toussaint Louverture, Tracker, Transformation, Troubles, Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky, Twist of Fate, Ubohý pan Kufalt, Ultraviolet, Under the Bridge, Underworld, Unlucky Girl!, Unorthodox, Unterleuten: The Torn Village, V, Vanished 46, Vanity Fair, Villain: Perpetrator Chase Investigation, Viso d'angelo, Vocation, War & Peace, War and Peace, War Sailor, Warera ga Paradise, Wayward Pines, Wedding Impossible, When Heroes Fly, When I See Your Face, Where Your Eyes Linger, White House Plumbers, White Teeth, Who Were We Running From?, Wimarn Din, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, Wir sind das Volk - Liebe kennt keine Grenzen, Without Breast There Is No Paradise, Wolf Pack, World War II: When Lions Roared, Wycliffe YATAGARASU: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master, Yonder, You, Young Catherine, Каменская - 3,

Watch afterAhsoka, Band of Brothers Gen V Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Stranger Things

Studio21 Laps Entertainment,

Netflix’s attempt to adapt the well-received novel will make viewers wonder why they bothered.

This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the works being covered here wouldn’t exist.

NOW STREAMING:

If Shawn Levy, director of Netflix’s new miniseries All the Light We Cannot See, seems like an unnatural fit to direct All the Light We Cannot See, a limited series set in World War II’s Nazi-occupied France, it’s because he is. From Night at the Museum to Cheaper by the Dozen and, more recently, Free Guy, the director-producer is best known for lighthearted, family-friendly films. Unfortunately, this series does not prove to be a case of the unexpected choice yielding surprisingly excellent results.

Levy and screenwriter Steven Knight’s adaptation of the acclaimed book is clunky, obtuse, and painfully dull. If, like this reviewer, you’ve never read the celebrated novel that inspired the series, it’s difficult to understand why it’s worth adapting. In what feels like an endless sea of World War II dramas, All the Light We Cannot See fails to make a case for its existence, never mind stand out.

The limited series follows blind French girl Marie-Laure LeBlanc (newcomer Aria Mia Loberti) and German soldier Werner Pfennig (Louis Hofmann). They struggle to survive the final days of the Nazi occupation in the seaside French town of Saint-Malo as bombs rained down from incoming American forces. Although initially strangers, the two share a love of an educational children’s radio program narrated by a mysterious professor broadcast. Now in their late teens, Marie-Laure uses her missing uncle’s radio equipment to share coded instructions from the French Resistance. Meanwhile, as part of the Nazis’ radio surveillance unit, Werner listens in, doing his best to conceal her messages.

All the Light We Cannot See (Netflix) — Louis Hofmann takes a nice normal jog. (Netflix)

Flashbacks show us Werner’s early life at a German orphanage and Marie-Laure’s genteel childhood in Paris under the care of her museum keeper father, Daniel LeBlanc (Mark Ruffalo.) Lars Eidinger rounds out the cast as Nazi commandant Reinhold von Rumpel. He’s a shambling, terminally ill villain who believes the LeBlancs are hiding a rare magical life-saving diamond called the Sea of Flames.

Despite the series’ very title referencing an interesting idea from one of the Professor’s broadcasts— the notion that the most important light is that of the mind’s eye, inside our brains— Levy and Knight’s adaptation is painfully incurious about the scientific principles that fascinate and motivate its characters. Somehow, the show’s four-hour runtime is both too short and too long simultaneously. As disasters and discoveries buffet Marie-Laure and Werner, the audience gets little insight into their interior lives. Loberti and Hofmann’s staid, understated performances do little to enrich the material. It’s hard to understand why their characters connect beyond their mutual interest in radio. Putting her disability aside, Marie-Laure is a generic spunky heroine, Werner blandly noble. Given that he’s an actual Nazi soldier, the characters’ lack of chemistry makes their mismatched romance even harder to swallow.

It’s immediately evident Levy does not trust his audience.

The dialogue certainly does the young actors no favors. Knight’s writing here is stagey and fake-sounding, as though lifted directly from the novel’s unique prose style without much thought for how it would play onscreen. Despite the meticulous research that author Anthony Doerr famously poured into All the Light We Cannot See, the miniseries version feels painfully false, like a World War II story based on movies instead of historical accounts. One scene featuring Sergeant von Rumpel feels like a particularly egregious knockoff of Christophe Waltz’s character from Inglourious Basterds. Ruffalo, an American, and Hugh Laurie, a British man, are made to play members of the same French family. They meet in the middle, affecting similar, old-fashioned Mid-Atlantic accents. It’s a decision that lends a bizarre stuffiness to even the most emotional scenes.

James Newton Howard scores all the aforementioned emotional scenes with treacly, swelling music. It’s immediately evident Levy does not trust his audience to understand what is happening or how they should feel. Condescending under the best circumstances, it feels especially insulting considering how much nuance the filmmakers stripped from the source material with this ham-fisted retelling. Maybe that’s why Netflix’s All the Light We Cannot See feels less like an adaptation of an internationally acclaimed novel and more like one from a tepid Young Adult paperback. One could almost believe this World War II tragedy was aimed at actual children until casually tossed-off references to real-life atrocities bring things crashing back down to Earth. “You like ovens in Germany, don’t you?” a member of the French Resistance sneers at Werner. It’s startling since the horrific crimes perpetrated against the Jews and other marginalized groups barely received mention until that point.

Levy’s boilerplate directing style does the complex source material a massive disservice as well. The direction is rote and flat save for a few striking moments, most notably at the Nazi school Werner must attend. The same warm orange light pervades most scenes. It makes even secret Nazi headquarters look cozy, like a World War II Thomas Kinkade painting. The production design by Simon Elliott does little to make the characters’ world feel more lived in.

Some of the show’s most affecting moments are small ones. For instance, viewers witness a starving Marie-Laure desperately smashing a can of peaches against a table to open it. Unfortunately, Levy breezes by these details in favor of big set pieces replete with unconvincing CGI effects. He’s not a fit for this heavy, detailed historical story. It’s a shame that he didn’t bring more of his comic sensibilities to All the Light We Cannot See. A few well-placed moments of comic relief might have at least made it less boring.

All the Light We Cannot See hits the airwaves via Netflix on November 2.