Emerald City

Emerald City has its moment as a vicarious, danger-packed thrill ride replete with jolts, wonders and ample shivers amid its shimmers.

This one is intended for adults that, if it was a film, it would carry a PG-13 rating. It’s gritty and violent. And also visually spectacular.

Fans of the alternate reality/fantasy genre should enjoy “Emerald City,” and I think they’ll get a kick out of its parallels to “The Wizard of Oz,” and in trying to guess what’s coming next.

For the most part, the characters hook our attention, and the performances are mostly pretty solid. Arjona’s performance grounds the series well.

Friday’s premiere consists of two episodes, which is good, because two hours is about how long it takes you to acclimate to the tone and intent. In the third episode, a doozy, the show’s grip on you really tightens.

It all looks good, but Arjona never gains real traction as Dorothy and some of the side stories become distractions. Still, Emerald City is an ambitious, if derivative, project for broadcast television.

It remains to be seen if viewers latch on to a visually sumptuous but narratively messy take on an old story. In the meantime, enjoy the insanity of the ride, if you can make any sense of it.

Emerald City is a sometimes chaotic cocktail of familiar characters, fairytale elements, sex and drugs, and a hero’s journey that doesn’t ever feel totally cohesive. But its visuals, crafted by the director Tarsem Singh, are endlessly creative, and the weaker primary cast members are buffeted by an array of gifted supporting actors.

It’s all very big and bold, and boring.

When Emerald City builds much of its narrative around how weird and edgy the place is, it just feels tired. You’ve seen this take on Oz before--and done better.

It's just as muddled as "Once" often is, and too ridiculous to be taken seriously as an epic as "Thrones," which is not surprising, given the show's long stay in development purgatory.

Emerald City is trying to be both, and also be better and different than the Once Upon A Times and Game of Thrones of the world, but despite some memorable visuals, it’s a master of none of its tricks.

Director Tarsem Singh produces dazzling visuals and an invigorating weirdness in all 10 eps. But the storytelling is too disjointed and the drama is too symbolic. The performances range from spirited to adequate to Dorothy. [30 Dec 2016 - 6 Jan 2017, p.108]

So much of Emerald City reads like a paint-by-numbers grim-and-gritty update of The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz and its abundant sequels, it borders on self-parody. ... And yet Emerald City is too singularly bonkers, too gorgeously assembled, to dismiss out of hand.

A grim grind of a trip down that emblematic yellow road.

Practically all this ill-conceived series has going for it is spotting the mutations in plot and characters brought on by the conversion from fairytale to cheerless sword-and-sorcery epic.

It's kind of a mess but your mileage may vary, especially since the first few hours are enough to keep you trying to figure out the mysterious direction Shaun Cassidy, David Shulner, Matthew Arnold and Josh Friedman--who developed the 10-hour series--are going in, led there by director Tarsem Singh (Mirror Mirror).

The visual qualities that make Emerald City so intriguing can’t make up for a meandering narrative that chugs and sputters along, with no one to really root for. The characters are flat, and the actors playing them seem as befuddled as the viewer about the ambiguous shades of good and evil from one scene to the next.

With more complicated characters and relationships and a livelier sense of momentum, it might have been a more artful meditation on the use of power and the costs of loyalty. But, echoing the fate of those grounded monkeys, the plight of these travelers never really takes flight.

Emerald City's ambitious pretensions of being the next great adult dark fantasy keeps colliding with childish, clumsy tendency toward unpleasant shock value. [2-15 Jan 2017, p.19]

It’s hard to keep the story straight, as new and old characters mingle and the mostly anemic performances weaken the show's hold on our attention.

While it displays some dazzling visual flair and is plenty ambitious in its scope, like a certain famous Scarecrow, this ponderous revamp doesn’t seem to have much of a brain at all.

The entire thing feels too canny, too much the result of a marketplace gamble, and that’s especially dispiriting in light of the fact that all ten episodes are directed by Tarsem Singh, an extravagant visual stylist whose work tends to have a music-video-fashion-show-nightmare vividness even when the story makes no sense and isn’t trying to.

All the trappings of “The Wizard of Oz” without any of the charms.

Emerald City is a turgid attempt at fantasy burdened by the weight of its own pretensions.

The writing doesn’t work. And scenes within the title location are in even more need of a rewrite.

A labored, humorless attempt to turn “The Wizard of Oz” into a “Game of Thrones”-like epic.

The plotting is goofy, the tone is relentlessly dark and the pacing is excruciatingly slow. Worst, the characters are hard to care about.

I wanted to check out the moment Dorothy Gale was waterboarded.