1899

 1899 is an eight-part mini-series broadcast in 2022 on Netflix.  It was produced with an international cast by the German team responsible for Dark, a well-received time-traveling mini-series that lasted for several seasons. (For all I know, it may be still be in existence -- I watched a couple shows and found the program so confusing and gloomy that I gave up on it.) The premise of 1899 is initially compelling -- a giant luxury liner, modeled, it seems, on the Titanic is plying stormy seas where its sister-ship (the Cerberus) vanished a few months earlier.  The passengers consist of a proto-feminist neurologist, a brave and resourceful Pole who shovels coal into the steamer's ovens, an imperious French woman, a Chinese mother and daughter, as well as a cargo-hold full of ragged and impoverished Danes in transit to the New World. There are a couple of homosexuals, this being a very "woke" show, although some of this stuff is unintentionally retrograde -- one of the gay guys pretends to be a priest; the other molests a sexually ambiguous Danish boy with a big scar next to his eye.  In addition, the tormented captain of the ship called the Prometheus (Captain Eyk, a German) has a prominent role.  In one weirdly racist scene, the obligatory Black character emerges -- and I kid you not -- from the coal bin where he has been hiding.  The Prometheus comes upon the wreck of the Cerberus in which a small silent boy is discovered -- the boy is silent for the most obvious reason (an example of spectacularly indolent screenwriting), that is, so he can't reveal the big secrets motivating the film's action.  The kid has a mechanical beetle, sort of like a scarab, the runs around -- for what purpose, I don't know, although the beetle is useful in creating transitions, literally leading the camera from one place to another.  The ships are both gloomy places full of dark, wood-lined passageways leading between berths.  The Danes live in a kind of subterranean hold, deep in the ship.  Fortunately, there are holes in the floors of some of the cabins that lead to other places -- a sort of trench in Africa where a subplot right out of Beau Geste seems to be underway, a meadow in Germany, a mountainous frigid landscape in Iceland or northern Scotland complete with another labyrinth -- an abandoned mental hospital.  Another tunnel leads from the Prometheus to a shack somewhere in the Arctic circle and a desolate wasteland dominated by a jet black pyramid. (This sort of stuff was pioneered by Tarkovsky's Solaris to which 1899 is immensely inferior. I won't mince words and, therefore, the rest of his review is replete with spoilers.  (If any of these revelations seriously surprise you, dear reader, I'm sorry but you must be an idiot -- the outcome of the whole thing is obvious beginning at the end of the second episode when the separate characters all appear in video screens embedded in a wall someplace.  Of course, it's all a video game or computer simulation.  Nothing is real.  The characters are all entangled in glitches in the matrix.  The wormholes leading to various computer-simulated landscapes are identical, more or less, with the different simulations in Westworld -- 1899 is better, merely because it is shorter and not quite as tedious as the HBO show (although Westworld had far better actors) and the Netflix series is far less pointlessly confusing.  But, as in Westworld, nothing is real --everything is a computer simulation.  And, since nothing is real, there are no rules and anything can happen.  And, further, since nothing is real, you don't need to waste your time with this well-produced but pretentious and fundamentally moronic nonsense.  I'm ashamed of your, dead Reader, if, like this writer, you spent eight hours watching this stuff.