Sense8

Sense8's ensemble is contemporaneous, creating an exciting real time tension as the characters take advantage of their seven partners' unique specialties and experiences to unravel mysteries in their own respective scenarios.

[The stories] mostly do stand on their own. Some are better than others.... a winning cast.

It can lead to indulgent storytelling, but in the case of a series like Sense8, real artistry, too.

Despite the lack of A-list Hollywood star power, the mysterious show boasts strong characters and compelling actors bringing them to life. And though the story sometimes meanders about like a child at play in a schoolyard, the premise holds enough intrigue to call viewers back to experience more.

Slightly mad, madly majestic and overwhelming, Netflix's new offering Sense8 is one of the most ambitious sci-fi dramas on TV since the Battlestar Galactica reboot in 2004.

The filmmaking here is fluid and the performances are strong across the board.

The siblings have frequently struggled to fully realize their ideas, too often failing to find the exact right balance between the silly and the sublime. (Multi-culti dance party in Matrix Reloaded, I’m looking at you.) With Sense8, they finally achieve that harmony.

Overall, the first season of Sense8 doesn't quite work the way it should. But it's hard not to step back and say, "Goddamn--the balls on that show." It's the pole-vaulter who knicks the bar with her ankle on the descent

Sense8 is a show forever trapped between two things--its core artistic impulses and its need to over-explain everything that happens within its confines. That makes it at once beautiful and maddening, either a complete travesty or a whacked-out masterpiece--and sometimes both in the same scene.

The ultimate paradox of Sense8 is that it can give away so little about its ultimate destination in three hours of screen time, and still be seductive enough to make hour four an attractive proposition.

The plots of Sense8 dovetail and separate with a fluidity that’s a characteristic of good storytelling and editing. Some of the subplots are more interesting than others.

Beautifully shot and sublimely silly, Sense8 is slower than “The Matrix” and not nearly as thrilling.

With so many crudely drawn characters, most of whom never interact face to face, and a less-is-more approach to explaining the origin and goal of the sensate experiments, Sense8’s sumptuous visuals are its only consistent selling point. But usually, the look is all Sense8 needs, since it has far too many moving pieces to enroll the audience in trying to assemble them into a larger picture.

This is a show that has the most lofty objective of all--getting people around the world to care about one another--and yet it struggles with the much simpler goal of making viewers care about the characters. It’s ambitious and passionate and very deeply flawed.

It's aiming for something big, and while these three episodes give me no idea if they can ultimately hit the mark, they're also more interesting than they have any right to be considering how incoherent so much of it is.

Maybe if the individual fragments in Sense8 were better written, the uber-plot wouldn’t matter quite as much. The Sense8 stories are beautifully shot, including some fabulous action sequences; but they’re rooted in familiarity, formula, and cultural clichés.

The more you care about dialogue, the less you will like it. Visually, though, the show is mesmerizing and immersive, particularly in moments of either complete chaos (underground kick-fighting match, raaaah!) or shocking stillness. The performances, particularly Tuppence Middleton as our pixie DJ and Freema Agyeman as Nomi's girlfriend, are terrific, but they're also squandered on stories that lack any real depth or texture.

Brilliant as so much of Sense8 is, it’s also at brief times inexplicably lame.

A globe-spanning series that offers in ambition, action and visual panache what it lacks in coherence, fleshed-out characters and plausible dialogue.

The problem with Sense8 is that it’s glacially paced and not nearly as riveting as it thinks it is.

It’s a worldwide story that manages to look and feel completely mundane, with boring visuals and inconsistent performances.

Sense8 becomes a pretty mundane, chaotic soap opera, following the lives of its various characters without doing much to advance what binds them.