Each work of art has levels of reading, so the viewer can follow the story of the series or movie, to enjoy the beauty, imagination, and music, and he can also link that story and the way the work maker tells it to his social reality and the beauty, ugliness, or conflicts it contains, but there are works that push his viewer to a level Deeper is about meditation and reflection on the wisdom of life and beyond.

And the series "1899", by creators Baran Bo Odar and Jantje Frizier, comes to represent one of those works that combine an atmosphere of terror and an entertaining story that monitors the struggle of classes, as well as that meditation that refers the viewer to a world of endless questions.

The events of "1899" revolve around an immigrant ship heading west towards America, to leave the old continent.

The passengers are a mixture of people of European descent, speaking different European languages, namely English, German, Danish, Spanish, French and Cantonese, and their hopes and dreams of the new century and their future abroad.

Their journey takes an unexpected turn when they discover another immigrant ship adrift at sea;

What they find on board turns their path to the promised land into a terrifying nightmare.

The story was divided into 8 chapters in 8 episodes, and each chapter monitored an aspect of the trip related to its title.

The first episode came under the title "The Ship", and the main event centers around the heroine "Maura Franklin" (actress Emily Beecham) who helps a pregnant woman, and saves her fetus from death, while Captain "Ike Larsen" (actor Andreas Pietschmann) makes a brave decision to help a lost ship Despite receiving an order from the owner company to sink it, he discovers strange things.

The second episode came under the title “The Boy”, to tell the story of the discovery of a lonely boy alive in the ship, and a strange man follows Mora, and begins with the third episode, which came under the name “The Fog”, a series of tragic death events until Mora regains her memory to stop the sound that drives Passengers commit suicide, revealing the catastrophic truth that there is no ship and no ocean to begin with.

vagueness

It is difficult to find logic in the relations between "things" in at least the first seven episodes of the series "1899", and despite this, the viewer cannot stop wondering and seeking to decipher the incantations that accumulate through 8 episodes, and he cannot be free from symbols. Terrifying until he reaches the eighth and final episode, only to discover that the work was nothing but a case of virtual reality similar to what was presented before in the movie "Truman Show" by Hollywood star Jim Carrey, with a huge technological difference.

The whole work is a simulation program, and as the final scene ends, the same question arises: Was the series itself real or a simulation of one of the most exciting and symbolic series in an endless game of puzzles and puzzles?

The work makers chose to make the situation reversed in telling their story, and instead of trying to reach the viewer and simplify the way he told the story to him, they made riddles and riddles and put very few clues that lead the viewer to solutions that are more ambiguous than the problems around the work, and the viewer has to rewrite the story in Each time, to find a logical or appropriate path to it.

reading levels

The atmosphere refers to a horror series with a somewhat complex story on the surface, but deconstructing the form of the narration returns it to its origin as it revolves around a psychologist who conducts experiments to explore human behavior under various pressures, and uses his daughter, husband and son in these experiments, and the brother appears to be mysteriously involved with his father .

The daughter's husband seeks to free the daughter and the child from the father's control, so he spoils the simulation program that the father made to push a group of people to live together in certain circumstances and discover their reactions, but the same mistakes are made in each experiment, and it ends with the death of the group, and the father repeats the experiment with deleting the participants' memory .

Filming came in the narrow corridors of the ship, to create a state of tension contributed to by the poor lighting of the scenes, as well as the dramatic sharp turns.

The sense of confinement of space does not leave the viewer as the camera exits to the deck of the ship, as the scene of fog in the middle of the dark ocean dominates the situation, creating loneliness and fear of the unknown.

The passengers of each ship see in the commander (the captain) a savior and protector from the fluctuations of the ocean and the ship's malfunctions, but the captain of Prometheus is no less confused than the passengers, and he is subjected to a coup and his imprisonment, and then the ship becomes without a leader, so that the situation collapses towards the brink of explosion.

Titanic shades

Many of the Netflix series carry shades of previous famous works, which is an expression of the profound impact of those works, and that class distinction appeared between the rich passengers who enjoy full privileges on the deck of the ship and those poor people who are locked at the bottom and exposed to various dilemmas, and their view indicates poverty and deprivation. .

The makers of “1899” transferred an entire scene from the 1997 movie Titanic, directed by James Cameron, where first-class passengers sit around the luxurious dining table and begin to gossip and show off the features of their wealth, which refers to the same scene that brought together the actor Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of the young Tramp. "Jack" with the passengers of the Titanic, including the girl "Rose" (English actress Kate Winslet) and her family.

The original scene and the scene copied from it express the features of the rich class, its trivial preoccupations, the arrogance and contempt it exercises on others in exchange for the simplicity of the poor.

The rest of the "1899" scenes appear to be strongly influenced by Cameron's film, especially the filming between the galleries of the two ships that were the focus of the events.

The suicide call that prompted a large number of the ship's passengers to jump from the edge towards death constituted the climax of another tragedy, but its reading indicates that it is a metaphor for expressing the end of every living thing.

The work makers are looking for answers to questions that have long haunted philosophers and thinkers about the universe, creation, and the Creator, and they see the world in a very black perspective that mixes the history of immigration to the new world at the end of the 19th century, and the tragic fates of those who tried to migrate, and mixes between those who found their predetermined ways, and those Those who lost their way, rushed into an endless maze.