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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
2
Mixed:
18
Negative:
7
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Critic Reviews
Oct 30, 2023
Season 1 Review:
It's not that All the Light We Cannot See is bad; it's a fine way to spend four hours. It's just that there was so much potential for the emotions to be more heightened, the characters to be more complicated and interesting, and the story to be more thought-provoking. The show could have been much more than just fine.
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TV Guide MagazineNov 2, 2023
Season 1 Review:
Looks and sounds ravishing - James Newton Howard's lush score will have you choked up from the start. Too bad the perfunctory script simplifies the WWII yarn into a manipulative cartoon fable. .... Exquisite newcomer Aria Mia Loberti is a find. [6 - 26 Nov 2023, p.9]
Oct 10, 2023
Season 1 Review:
It’s there, it’s nice to look at, it does everything you expect it to do, and then it ends. It should have been so much more, and could have been in the hands of a different creative team, but it’s hard to imagine it latching onto the consciousness in the same way the novel did.
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ColliderSep 11, 2023
Season 1 Review:
With each moment only scratching the surface of the ideas that were put forth in beautiful yet harrowing detail in the lyrical novel, the series does a disservice to the story. It isn’t a complete disaster due to the work of the cast, but it is disappointing to see how it sands down all the more memorable elements of the source material for something more superficial.
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Nov 2, 2023
Season 1 Review:
There are melodramatic excesses — primarily involving a rotating cast of variously rabid Nazi officers — and convenient lapses of logic, but there is an overall level of restraint and wit in Knight’s screenplay that keeps “All the Light” from tilting completely over into shamelessness. If you are amenable to being manipulated in the service of an emotional workout, you probably won’t feel bad in the morning.
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Nov 2, 2023
Season 1 Review:
Everything about All the Light We Cannot See – from the World War II backdrop to the starry supporting players to having a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel as source material – screams prestige, which makes the lifelessness of this four-part Netflix limited series more pronounced. Handsomely done and strangely hopeful, it has all the hallmarks of an ambitious misfire.
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The IndependentNov 2, 2023
Season 1 Review:
The show could be forgiven some shonkiness and self-indulgence if the central chemistry between Marie and Werner was coherent. But the achronological telling wreaks havoc with their relationship, and the German soldier is relegated to a footnote. What’s left is a cartoonish portrait of a Nazi in pursuit of a blind girl’s diamond, which does little credit to the sheer scale of suffering endured in both our recent history and the contemporary moment.
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Radio TimesOct 30, 2023
Sep 11, 2023
Season 1 Review:
All the Light We Cannot See turns ideas into platitudes and foregrounds generic war tropes, an unmysterious mystery and impatiently rushes to connect the parallel narrative threads in unconvincing ways. Loberti, a legally blind graduate student with no acting training, is such a good and pure presence that she almost salvages the show around her.
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