World Without End

2012
World Without End
6.9| 6h29m| en| More Info
Released: 01 January 2012 Released
Producted By: Scott Free Productions
Country: United Kingdom
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Synopsis

The English town of Kingsbridge works to survive as the King leads the nation into the Hundred Years' War with France while Europe deals with the outbreak of the Black Death.

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Scott Free Productions

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Reviews

bradsholto The absolute worst! Whoever decided to air this drivel should be drawn and quartered, and yes I read the book and this is a massacre of it! How this ever got aired could only be a case of nepotism or outright sabotage. I am at a loss to come up with words to decry this utter garbage, I feel sorry for the actors who had to put up with this utter crap.
polygnotus Unlike the first series, "Pillars of the Earth", this series was nothing but a way to hook people into watching it. The plot could really be summed up as "Man reached his goal...almost, but is knocked back down...five times.In other words, this was the TV series version of "clickbait". So manipulative and devoid of any genuine expression or sentiment, I imagined, while watching this, a future where TV shows are nothing more than vehicles for stimulation - emotional, sexual, visual, whatever.Then I realized that's not the future. It is now. All these shows, CSi, Ripper Street, others, all they are is delivery devices for an emotional stimulation - the way porn movies are constructed with some kind of "plot" designed to result in sexual encounters.World Without End was essentially a kind of pornography, except it wasn't selling sex. It was selling rage and violence and injustice.Was anyone buying? Not me.
Lammasuswatch I note that some other reviewers here mention that they gave up watching this series part-way through Episode 1. That was probably wise, especially if you like Ken Follett's books.The series from the first book "Pillars of the Earth" was fairly satisfying. So how could "World Without End" be such a fizzer? Where do I begin?Perhaps, with all the production companies involved - from at least three different countries - simply too many cooks spoiled the broth. You get the impression that someone asked all stakeholders to fill out a questionnaire on what they wanted. Then all answers were compiled, and someone decided to include them all. None of the stakeholders had read the book? No problem.The studio moguls obviously wanted at least one international draw-card among the cast. Who gets top billing here? Cynthia Nixon! (Who?) She stood out all right, but for absolutely woeful acting. Very ably assisted by a number of ham-acting sequences by much of the cast at one time or another. (And most of these people can actually act, so you really can't blame anything except poor direction or the awful script.)I often marveled at the way the miniseries characters were turned into cartoon caricatures, making any logical character development almost impossible. The most ludicrous example was changing relatively minor book character Petranilla into a vehicle for Cynthia Nixon to channel mass murderer Lucrezia Borgia - but laughably. And while the fatal character flaws of Godwin in the novel interestingly turn him bit by bit from a basically good person towards ever greater moral degradation, the treatment in the miniseries has him labeled 'baddie' about as soon and unsubtly as possible. I'm sure black stetson hats would not have been thought amiss by some of the people putting this film together.But every character was pretty one-dimensional, good or bad. And to be honest, it was difficult to care too much about what happened to any of them. And what could even the best actors and directors do with this screenplay? Besides its careless historical deficiencies, it often just didn't come together dramatically or logically. From a rather awful first episode in which the clichés come thick and fast, the miniseries actually improves for the middle episodes, but it does eventually get tedious with the continually repeated pattern: 'goodies try to do good, baddie thwarts this for no good reason, goodies back to scratch, next item'. It's turned a complex and generally very satisfactory novel into R-rated late-night soap opera. Historical accuracy is an obvious casualty. Other reviewers have pointed out things wrong with this historically, but no-one else seems to have seen the most obvious and careless error. After witnessing a battle in France, nuns Caris and Meir are seen returning to England by ship, with this shot labeled on screen "Autumn 1341". And in the same scene we see they are accompanied at the dock by (drum roll) plague-bearing rats. Then shortly after, of course, the Black Death makes its entrance. Except that the Black Death didn't even get to Europe until 1347, and certainly not to England until 1348! The director could have got away with no date labeling here, since there was none that existed or that at least stood out anywhere else. But to get the onset of the Black Death - one of the defining events of British and European history - so publicly wrong! All you have to do is look up Wikipedia to check this! But guess what? No-one had the sense to.I was wondering if this gaffe was a result of the international crew? Was the label actually supposed to read "Autumn 1347"? (Which would have been accurate.) Could it have been that a European crew created this graphic, misreading an English "7" as a European "1? Who knows? But that may be an explanation rather than an excuse. The fact that no-one bothered to proof-read this date is completely symptomatic of the carelessness with which this series was put together.Historical accuracy apart, the plot doesn't flow logically either. I have seldom seen a story "tie all strands together" so unsatisfactorily in its concluding episode. It's not this way in the novel, but since the script artificially extends the life spans of the two now principal baddies (Godwyn and Petranilla actually die about two thirds of the way though the novel during the first wave of the Black Death), the miniseries has to somehow kill them off spectacularly. But it even manages to turn these sequences into somewhat ridiculous anticlimaxes.And the final battle! Clearly the medieval miniseries rulebook states that any remotely medieval story must end in an epic final battle, although there is no hint of such in the book and it certainly doesn't suffer for it. Having the series end with the king's army attacking Kingsbridge might have worked, if it were not so unconvincing logically and dramatically. (That's ignoring its historical inappropriateness, but when has anyone in this series cared about that?) Virtually everything about it from the tactics of both attackers and defenders, through to the fight of the two kings does not work logically. (No-one seriously notices that another knight has a sword to the throat of Edward III?!) And then Edward suddenly calls the whole thing off, with everyone obediently stopping the fight. (And really - Thomas Langley IS Edward II? Did no-one ever recognize their former king? Seriously?)I was not able to recall how this miniseries had ended the morning after I watched this last episode, despite wracking my brains and being able to blame neither alcohol nor Alzheimer's. All I actually remembered was laughing in disbelief for the last few minutes. Such was the impression it made. I give "World Without End" a reluctant two stars for the fact that it got better in the middle - for a while.
Angel Clare While the production quality was excellent and the acting above par (the actors did what they could with the script), this mini-series was a huge disappointment.I was an enormous fan of the previous series ("The Pillars of the Earth")--indeed, enough of a fan to sludge through the tastelessly pretentious and mind-numbingly boring novel afterwards--so I was keen on a sequel series. Alas.Major issues: None of the protagonists had *any power whatsoever* the entire length of the series. None. I understand the whole "rising above the odds" trope that the plot was going for, but this series took it too far. "The Pillars of the Earth" used this trope, but perhaps due to actors with less charisma, or a weaker script, or something else, "World Without End" was simply painful to watch. Even the conclusion was weak--bad guys die in a hurry, hooray. The protagonists are never empowered. The antagonists, of course, are both many and powerful, and even receive the better half of the script.I couldn't cheer for any of the protagonists. One, because they never won anything; and two, because they were hardly given enough character for me to cheer for.You could call this a "sprawling epic," but I would place the emphasis on "sprawling." It overreached itself and fell on its face, sprawled on the muddy floor to be--hopefully--forgotten.