The Flat And Lifeless Riese
I tried to like the web series Riese, which premiered in November with a substantial production budget behind it. But it’s a problem for any show when its lead goes about her business looking nothing so much as bored for the entirety of the roughly 45-minute story.
I should explain up front that this is the second version of this review. I went into my first attempt intending a piece mainly about disappointment. I feel bad about it, but upon my re-watch of the entirety of the just-concluded Chapter One, it’s become a piece that can’t help sum itself up at the start with the bluntness above.
It’s true that the strange quietness of the almost dialogue-free opener, embedded above, and the vague intimations of steampunk in the series’ design and promotion, intrigued enough for me to want to see what the series had in store. But it didn’t take long for that initial interest to turn, mainly, into a sort of impatience. What little online discussion I read tended to gravitate to the same early criticism: poor pacing. Too little seemed to be happening in a series whose episodes clocked in at around eight minutes in length each.
By the time we got to this week’s release of the fifth and final episode in the series’ first chapter (the second chapter shot in December for a release cycle to start in February), that frustration expanded to a more encompassing theme: almost everything in the series — pacing and energy, action and dialogue, the performances themselves — is, in a word, flat.
There’s an almost complete lack of variation in tone, events happen at more or less the same speed, and no one seems particularly invested in anything they are saying or doing. For all the attention the project has generated — whether due to its creator’s use of social media and a sort of alternate reality game (ARG), or through some attempts at comparing it to Sanctuary, which went from the web to television — the end result has been something of a disappointment.
Where there should be a serious attempt to generate a real and palpable tension, Riese instead presents us with thumping music played over lugubrious camera work. On occasion, an actor apparently was told to breathe heavy. In essence, the series indicates tension but never actually presents tension.
That might be the crux of most of the series’ deficiencies: it indicates rather than presents. There’s no sense of who any of the characters are as people, until and unless we get one of the stray moments in which one character says to describe another. Indication instead of presentation.
During my re-watch, my notes for this, the second version of this post, became increasingly staccato. It might make sense just to combine by theme and offer them up here as bullet points.
- Over-reliance upon thumping music to tell you to be interested, or to try to compensate for flat movement. Pointless Batman-like camera angles, to go with the thumping music, to try to get you interested in nothing happening on screen. Endless shots of Riese walking through the forest, or walking through hallways, or walking outside buildings, or standing around breathing heavy isn’t tension, especially not just because there’s thumping music. It’s just monotonous.
- Unfortunately, the lead mainly comes across like she’s playacting, not acting. Everything she does is exactly the same, via the exact same lack of expression. Half of the time when Riese is in danger, she just looks, in fact and instead, bored. The only variation comes when the director apparently told her to breathe heavy to indicate tension.
- Dialogue is stilted, or too on the nose, or too clunkily expository, delivered with no life in it. Why does everyone talk so slowly? Countless pauses (in conversation or even within a single character’s lines) and laconic delivery isn’t, again, tension or interesting character dynamics. It’s just boring.
- No sense of character comes from the performances.
One realization that struck me during the re-watch necessitates a comparison. While my introduction to web series came through Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and The Guild, it was After Judgment which convinced me that dramatic science fiction not only could successfully take to the form, but be done well.
The first season of After Judgment (leaving out the intertwining, and semi-separate Before Judgment), consists of sixteen episodes totaling around an hour of story. While a bit more happens in terms of plot development and exposition in that hour than happens in Riese’s forty-five minutes, it isn’t enough more to explain the differences. After Judgment, unlike Riese, flows smoothly and offers a clear sense of an entire range of characters just from the performances alone.
But in Riese, I have no sense of even just the title character beyond what someone else says about her — unless I’m supposed to be getting something from the fact that she’s bored all the time and breathes heavy.
For all of Riese’s much-vaunted budget, After Judgment manages to best it on almost every count — proving, if nothing else, that it isn’t money or connections or marketing savvy that makes for a good web series. All things considered, I’ll take a lively script and dynamic performances but no real budget over the opposite any day.
There was some chatter from the series’ creators on Twitter that they were reading the criticisms from certain quarters and taking some of them into consideration as they put together the second chapter. Most of those early criticisms were generally about the pacing issue, but my re-watch made it clear to me that the pace of Chapter One is inextricably bound together with a larger set of issues.
And casting a number of recognizable genre actors for the upcoming episodes (see the series’ blog for details), as much as additional talent can often prompt others to step up their own game, isn’t going to be enough.
Addressing the issues above would invariably have an effect upon pacing, sure. But the problems aren’t that limited, or simple. It remains to be seen if in Chapter Two the series graduates from merely indicating to the audience how they should consider a given scene to actually presenting something which will instill the intended reaction.
I do still plan to check in with Riese than the series returns in February. But given that Chapter One led me from mere disappointment to something far more critical, they’ll have to overcome a fair amount of skepticism to snag me for all of Chapter Two.
