The series "The Witcher: Origins" based on the works of Sapkowski will be released on Netflix on December 25, foreign critics have already had the opportunity to get acquainted with the tape.
The vast majority of them speak negatively about the project.
Interestingly, their claims are mostly not about violating the canon and excessive attention of the project authors to the modern agenda.
They scold the new series for crumpled and too fast narration, superficiality, non-disclosure of characters and storylines.
Some critics even opined that Henry Cavill, who played Geralt on the original show, was right to leave the show - he supposedly had a premonition that the whole story would roll down, and decided wisely to leave at the peak without sullying his name with what would happen next.
Others say that Origin loses out to the original series simply because it's generic fantasy that lacks the charm and zest of the original.
Still others argue that the Netflix show lacks not only originality, but also meaning as such.
As a result, the prehistory, which was supposed to expand the universe, explain one or another of its features and give the viewer a greater understanding of the processes, at the output can please only with the fast pace of the narrative and the plot, which is very conditionally connected with the original story.
On the aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the series received only 39% positive reviews from critics.
In addition to all the shortcomings, the tape also suffers from a secondary and clichéd plot - seven losers and renegades, each with some dark secret, unite and fight the Empire, guided by principles that are more characteristic of the modern leftist agenda than of the magical Middle Ages.
One of the central characters - the dark-skinned elf Eile (Sophia Brown) - plays both a strong and independent woman who makes independent decisions (escapes from the royal guard to become a wandering musician; calls for an uprising against the Empire, which, in her opinion, is an absolute evil), and at the same time is a "replacement" for the beloved by the audience Buttercup.
After all, you can’t leave a work based on The Witcher without someone singing about “minted coins”.
Although, critics also note the reduced quality of musical numbers and complain about the complete lack of hits comparable to the songs from the original show.
© Frame from the trailer for the series The Witcher: Origins
Aile also has a love line - with Fjall (Lawrence O'Fuarine), another elite elven warrior expelled from his native land, but not everything is going smoothly here either: the reviews note too rapid development of relations between the characters.
Among the rest of the elves from this company is the heroine Francesca Mills.
The character, as critics note, is distinguished by increased bloodthirstiness and nihilism - either against the background of some complexes inherent in the character, or the showrunners found it funny to make the “death machine” the most unsuitable character for this (the actress’s height is 112 cm).
And the mini-elf is armed not with some daggers characteristic of undersized adventurers, but with a war hammer.
The few advantages of Origin include really impressive battle scenes (however, it’s hard to surprise fans of the Witcher saga), including one with the participation of another elven warrior performed by Michelle Yeoh (“Memoirs of a Geisha”, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” ).
The stellar cast and the convincing play of the actors are also distinguished.
A lot of positive reviews went to the work of artists and make-up artists.
The admiration of the reviewers was also caused by the appearance of Buttercup at the very beginning of the show.
The bard's cameo is explained by a meeting with the ghost of one of the heroines of Origin, who shares his memories with the musician so that he, in turn, would tell this story to people.
The elaboration of the world and its fall is also called a great merit: this is not a terrible Middle Ages, but an enlightened empire that has reached unimaginable heights in science and art, plunged into the abyss of disasters by the Conjunction of spheres - the contact of several different worlds.
The society of elves, who lived more than a thousand years before the birth of Geralt, seems much more sublime than the world that surrounds the witcher himself.
But the vast majority of critics agree that a series based on the Witcher universe without the Witcher itself, as such, is a rather controversial thing.
The showrunner of the series Declan de Barra stated that the idea came to him because of a desire to understand what the Conjunction of the Spheres is and how the elven civilization collapsed after the sudden appearance of people, as well as to tell the audience who the witchers are and where they came from. To avoid unnecessary parallels with the main series, the action of its backstory was moved 1200 years ago from the events in which Geralt of Rivia took part.
At the moment, only one character from Sapkowski's works who got into Origin is reliably known - Eredin, the leader of the Wild Hunt (a minor character in Sapkowski's book "Lady of the Lake" and the main antagonist in the game "The Witcher: Wild Hunt"), whose role performed by Jacob Collins-Levi ("Doctor Who", "White Princess").
The rest of the characters, at least the main ones, are the products of the imagination of six writers, a showrunner and two directors.
At the end of October 2022, Henry Cavill, who played the witcher Geralt of Rivia in the first three seasons of the show, announced his departure from the project.
The actor announced his decision in a post on the social network.
“My journey as Geralt of Rivia was full of monsters and adventures, but alas, in the fourth season I will remove my medallion and lay down my swords,” Cavill wrote.
In the same message, the actor said that his "successor" would be Liam Hemsworth, who previously played one of the roles in the films of the Hunger Games franchise.
This news caused a wide resonance among fans of the series - some of them begged Cavill to change their mind, arguing that Hemsworth could not cope with the embodiment of the image of Geralt, the other is ready to give the Australian a chance.
There is an opinion that Cavill, being a fan of the Witcher universe, decided to leave the series due to increasingly serious deviations from the Sapkowski canon - the finale of the second season does not correspond to the books at all.
Screenwriter Bo DeMaio, who also left the project, claimed that he had decided to leave, among other things, because of the attitude of some colleagues to history and the original source - they allegedly disliked him so much that they allowed themselves to ridicule Sapkowski's texts.