See

That near-total lack of character investment is the biggest impediment to engaging with the series on an emotional level, but it’s also damned hard to engage with it intellectually, because See also doesn’t seem to know what it’s saying. ... Only three episodes were provided for critics, so it’s possible that this particular element of the story will grow more complex as the season progresses.

It’s compelling and immersive, promising a sci-fi/fantasy epic that will span a generational tale, filled with impressive battle scenes and a dystopian future world that’s rendered with a visually spectacular cinematic production value that gives the whole world a massive sense of scope. It’s also downright weird and goofy at times, deliciously so, sometimes bordering on campy and giddily dipping a toe right over the line in the midst of the high-concept drama.

Unfortunately, the story hasn’t caught up to the ambition of the production design in the first few episodes.

Dull, predictable, scuzzy drama set centuries in the future after everyone on the planet has lost their sight.

This mix of influences and eras is ultimately more confusing than it is cohesive. The verdant background offers a compelling counterpoint to most dystopias, which often imagine either a sterile, skyscraper-filled world or a desolate wasteland. But there are so many other standard dystopian ideas at play here as to rob that decision of its novelty.

See (Apple TV+) is undeniably ravishing. It is also dreary, hysterical and often simply inept. A song of cripes and dire, if you will.

“See” is a gorgeously filmed series, and props are due to director Francis Lawrence for making the most its British Columbia settings. There’s also just enough fodder for thought in its exploration of how the massive scale elimination of a sense humans take for granted might, indeed, change the world. However – and yes, go ahead and call me a sensitive snowflake for this – there’s something profoundly ableist in the proposal that blind people would, in the span of a few generations, somehow forget that the sun is a big ball of flaming gas and start talking like Lothar of the Hill People.

As the show leans heavily on gore and predictable plot points, it proves that, at the very least, Apple has figured out the dirty truth of making TV: Even the strongest story pitches can blindly wander into a puddle of mediocrity.

This Jason Momoa vehicle takes itself so seriously that it suffocates. After a reasonably interesting premiere, the subsequent episodes suffer under a tone that can’t push through the world-building to give us characters or a story to care about. And it eventually becomes a slog, which is the last thing anybody wants from a streaming service offering.

See isn't close to a good show thus far, but it does just enough to make you believe that under the right circumstances, there might be a good show here somewhere, eventually.

The grand cinematography of the Canadian wilderness is beautiful. But for the most part, See proves that all the money in the world can't save a dud script. ... Nothing in the show works.

See is a lightly sci-fi trip through bland environments fronted by forgettable characters who exist according to some bizarre rules.

The story doesn’t gel well, and the video-game-like combat sequences can be exhausting. “See” is a camp-watch, and not much more.

Care was taken in the hiring of performers and consultants to make the presentation of blindness convincing. But no one seems to have done the more difficult, and boring, work of really thinking through how to make the premise convincing onscreen. For an Apple product, it’s a startling failure of engineering.

It is at best a fairly lazy copy of more effective genre entertainments’ tone, with messy and underbaked story filling in the gaps.

Saying it's not worth watching "See" is a little too easy. Still, with apologies to the owls, this show is strictly for the birds.

The majority of Knight’s series is a self-serious dirge, where sight-based wordplay like “So they just walk around with their eyes closed?” is delivered with a straight face. In the end, See’s myriad absurdities somehow add up only to a run-of-the-mill dystopia, where the children are the “chosen ones” and the tyrant must be overthrown.

See relies on graphically gory battle scenes to carry a largely incoherent story, but I found myself giggling far more often than its creators intended. You almost have to admire its goofy confidence… as wrongheaded as it might be.

Violent, grim, and exceptionally silly. It’s Bird Box meets Game of Thrones, but stupider.