All the Light I Wish I Didn't See
23 December 2023
Heads up: There are spoilers below for both the novel All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, and the Netflix Special of the same name.
The Netflix adaptation of All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is bad. Full stop. There are four episodes in the miniseries and I ground my teeth through the first one, but under no circumstances will I be finishing it. I suppose this makes me a poor researcher for my review of the series, or a person without a lot of gumption to pull through, but I have to protect my sanity. Netflix redefined the concept of "artistic liberty" with the amount of changes they made to the source material. Some things I can understand are required when moving from a text-based novel to a visual film, but the sum of the changes they made left the series a horrible shell of the original novel and wholly unenjoyable.
All the Light We Cannot See is a novel that follows two main characters, Werner Pfennig and Marie-Laure Leblanc, and it jumps around a timeline that spans just before the beginning of World War II to just before it ends. It covers later years in the epilogue to close plot threads. Because the book itself is not always presented in chronological order, I understand that Netflix may make changes to the order in which events are shown to better suit a film medium. What they did actually changed the cadence of the narrative, showing many events that happened immediately prior to the climax in the first episode, when the characters were lacking a defined sense of motivation. It jolted me into the story in a way I didn't like, even as someone who has read the book and knows what happens. I don't know how the rest of the series plays out, but it felt weird to see an hour's worth of pre-climax events and imagine the backstory to follow that up. The book does begin with some of the events that happen right before the climax, but as a teaser that shows a snapshot of the climactic setting before beginning the actual story - a freeze frame moment from an early 2000's movie. Watching the first episode of the miniseries, it felt more like just reading the third quarter of the book first.
Another choice made by Netflix was to slightly alter the cast. This struck me personally as I loved the character of Frank Volkheimer, who was killed off in the early parts of the episode. He is an important character in the epilogue of the novel, the catalyst that causes the final threads to tie together. Seething with rage after the first episode finished, I looked to reddit to see if I was justified in my ire, and comments there led me to believe that not only did they kill Volkheimer immediately, he was also not a character that showed up in the miniseries with any significance. They introduced a sergeant character who served little purpose but to cement the absolute character annihilation performed on Werner Pfennig.
Werner Pfennig is meant to be an absolutely spineless waif of a boy. Incredibly gifted with science and particularly electronics and radios, he goes to a Nazi boys school and is eventually made a soldier working with radio transceivers to triangulate dissenters. At that school, it is reinforced that he is not willing to step out of line. They make the students pour cold water on a Jewish prisoner in the winter, and Werner complies! His friend Frederick refuses to pour the water, so the reader can understand that the choice could be made. It draws the attention of the other students, who beat Frederick, and Werner watches without stopping them. He knows that what is happening is wrong, but he does not act to do what is right. Now that we've established that Werner is spineless, let's check back in on the Netflix show. Wait! He's lying? He's manipulating? He... kills that newly introduced sergeant character in cold blood? Can I double check what happened back at the boys school?
...Wait. I can't? They cut out the entirety of Werner's backstory in the show? That tracks, I suppose that literally everything he's ever done in his past counters what they tried to establish here. It made me so angry because I saw this novel as a human example of how two people's completely different lives could meet in one fateful moment. Werner is very flawed, which is what makes him such a good character. He kills only one person in the book, at the climax moment, which is what makes it so exciting. Until that moment, he exists only to complete the tasks assigned to him, which only ever involves using radio equipment. The killing is left to other people, and he still suffers from PTSD just from seeing it! He dies in a land mine, young and traumatized, and apparently he doesn't even die in the miniseries. To make him into this righteous hero saving a girl in the final strokes of the war as Germany is losing is foolish in the context of the source material and of the nature war itself.
Once the show had brought my blood to a thorough rolling boil and I knew I wouldn't watch any more episodes, I started to stew on literally anything that I didn't like. CGI has never interested me, I think it often detracts from the impact of a visual and almost always does not have enough weight and force in the real world. So, I didn't like how the bombers were animated. Mark Ruffalo's English accent as a French father was bad. They make Nazis look like cartoon villains. Werner was too big for a 17 year old boy meant to be smaller than a 15 year old blind girl (at least make him skinny! Not the beefy 25 year old they cast). I did not like the acting of the girl who played Marie-Laure. I didn't like that they hired a real blind girl to play young Marie-Laure, with the milky roving eyes of a real blind person, only to show the crystal clear and focused brown eyes of supposedly the same girl 7 years later in her degenerative eye disease (and have her also look 25). That might have been a scenario where there is value in CGI!
I suppose there was value in watching this. Art is supposed to make you feel! And boy, did I feel [homicidal rage]. It was so bad it even inspired me to write! How lucky am I to feel so many things about a piece of media that I am driven to create something in response. This long- winded rant post can be taken as a reminder that many 1-star reviews should be taken with a grain of salt. I'm sure the series is generally entertaining to people who have not read the book!
This show sucked! I would recommend it to no one. But I enjoyed the book! So pick up a copy at your local library or through the Libby app and read that instead.