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Critic Reviews
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Instead of making her second telling of The Luminaries a pale imitation of its predecessor, she [Eleanor Catton] offers up yet another set of twins: two consummate works in two different mediums.
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A cracking, challenging read has become a cracking, unchallenging series and both do their jobs perfectly. Joy.
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The Luminaries is luminous, at least when it’s visible. Not since Peter Jackson’s last elven ad campaign has there been so bewitching a screen vision of New Zealand.
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The Luminaries is placidly entertaining, and Hewson is likable in a listless role that becomes the focus of the entire production, but it lacks any spark that might make it an essential watch.
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The Luminaries makes for occasionally fascinating viewing, though conventional pleasures prove more elusive. ... You'll likely need to latch onto some of these performances and technical achievements, because The Luminaries is the sort of adaptation that may perplex audiences who haven't read the book and readers looking for fidelity to the book equally.
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The Luminaries doesn’t dig deep enough into its many possibilities—including any lore of the country it is set in—but Hewson’s soulful performance carries the show forward until its end.
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Catton's book is far more adventurous, and it's strange to think that she and her co-writer and series director Claire McCarthy diluted the novel's ambition so completely. The plot's lack of confidence notwithstanding, for some people Green's presence may provide enough reason to drift along from one beautiful sight to the next, unconcerned as to where it's all leading.
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Like the entire plot of “The Luminaries,” everything in this opening scene is overstuffed and hard to discern.
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In trying to make this sprawling narrative TV-friendly, a narrative momentum has been lost, with too many characters and too many timelines and situations going on at the same time. The three leads, Patel, Hewson and Green, all do good jobs with their roles, but the show just feels like it’s going to wander in the wilderness like the delirious Anna before it figures out where to go.
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With the Zodiac concept lapsing into relative incoherence, there’s too little to buoy the story; the timelines concern the prelude to and legal repercussions of a crime, but neither holds as much interest as does the beauty of the setting.
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Watching the first two-and-a-half hours was a bit like being in a drug-addled dream anyway: coherent in some places, baffling in others — weird timelines, plot strings as clear as mud and the production seeming perfectly content with that. The acting, though, is good. Commendable given that the actors are carrying the handicap of a complex novel confusingly boiled down to six episodes.