Katla

F*ck you Katla! You owe me six hours of my Life!! Katla is a series about a volcano, without a volcano! I can't think of a worse way to spend six hours in the last two years than watching Katla. Objectively, it would be somewhere between two and three stars, but I downright suffered through it, even considering and escort service halfway through to be able to finish. There is a real risk of bodily harm from boredom here! There should be awards for such voluntary torture. I did like the warning before the last episode that there would be suicide, so anyone prone to it had better avoid watching. The creators probably didn't count on the viewer wanting to commit suicide while watching Katla! Baltasar Kormákur has made a name for himself and I was looking forward to the series after the trailer (even naively hoping for some monsters), but got no volcano! The show stagnates from the first episode to the last, it doesn't really go anywhere, nothing really substantial or interesting happens, there's a bunch of unlikeable characters living boring ordinary lives solving boring ordinary problems. So sci-fi 10%, mystery 10%, drama=80%. Everything I hate multiplied by two! I could praise the decent visuals and the impressive setting and landscape, but the volcano is shown for maybe twenty minutes out of the six hours, so a huge disappointment in that respect too. Instead, it deals with family problems, and if someone can enjoy that I envy them, but it’s really not what I wanted. In addition, there are some characters – presumably clones, who knows – that are supposed to be the mystery element, so you at least hope they would pose a threat to the neighborhood. I was expecting a collapse of civilisation! Nope, instead they just blend in to lead ordinary boring lives (lounging on the couch and watching TV, really?!). The behaviour of some of the characters is really borderline (the mother, WTF?). The whole thing didn’t really make sense to me in the end. There are a few ordinary unsurprising twists, but there's a lot of drama, emotion and depression, after all that's more interesting than and apocalyptic event or the collapse of civilization. It's a pity that a potentially attractive premise has been turned into a completely ordinary and all-too normal drama, which didn't impress me with a single scene in the whole six hours, and that's saying something. Unrewarding, extreme slow-burn, without suspense, atmosphere or anything shocking. After it was over, I flew off to buy a bottle of whiskey and celebrated that I had successfully watched it. Probably the most physically demanding cinematic challenge of my life. Story***, Action>No, Humor>No, Violence>One Scene, Entertainment Zero, Music**, Visuals***, Atmosphere*, Suspense- Absent. 3/10 (18.06.2021)