Citadel on Prime: Why the Super Expensive Event Series is a Total Fail

As recently a detailed report on Prime Video in the Hollywood reporters explained, everything that could go wrong with “Citadel” went wrong behind the scenes. Original series creator Josh Appelbaum, episode director Brian Kirk and half their crew were fired after filming wrapped due to “creative differences”. The brothers Joe & Anthony Russo (known for “Avengers: Endgame”) have been responsible for the series as producers up to now, but now they rewrote the scripts themselves and took a seat behind the camera. Elaborate reshoots were commissioned, which escalated the budget. In the end, the eight sixty-minute episodes were cut to just six forty-minute episodes, entire storylines were removed in the edit and some action scenes were placed in completely different places than originally planned.

All these problems can be seen in “Citadel” effortlessly. The actual story of the series is told almost in passing, the first three episodes are dominated by wild action thunderstorms, which are strung together without any sense of tempo and tension and are also partly terribly badly tricked. Especially in the opening scene in a moving train and a later chase on skis, one wonders where all that money went. Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Richard Madden don’t develop any chemistry together, both seem miscast and don’t give their characters any depth at all – but how does it do when their acting performances have so obviously been completely cut up. For whom “Citadel” should be intended, however, remains open. Genre fans will already know all these set pieces a thousand times over and just as often have seen it used better, fans of the stars get almost nothing from them, and the show values ​​are not worth mentioning because of the sheer digital artificiality. The series isn’t even bad enough to be viewed as Guilty Pleasure or Hate Watch out of trash appeal – it’s just terribly irrelevant and correspondingly boring. Such productions come from people who no longer speak of “art” or “entertainment”, but only of “content”.

“Citadel” is just the symptom of a much bigger problem. Outrageously expensive blockbuster productions have been piling up on streaming services in recent years, all of which suffer from the same problems: They are extremely thin in terms of both figures and content, but are full of big names and offer a ridiculous amount of action, which, however, falls far short of the current technical standard in terms of special effects. Netflix has dug millions of graves with the wayward action hits “Red Notice” (starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot) and “The Gray Man” (starring Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans and directed by the Russo brothers). , Prime is now on with “Citadel” and on Apple TV+ “Ghosted” (with Ana de Armas and again Chris Evans) is getting mockery and malice from critics and audiences. They want to serve the summer cinema and pick up all the people who like to watch big and loud entertainment films without pretense. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with such films.

But producing these mega-budget productions for streaming reveals a mistake. If you go to the cinema for this, you want the big event there, whether it’s the visually stunning action sequences of “Top Gun: Maverick” or the fantastic worlds of “Avatar: The Way of Water”. Marvel’s superhero effects thunderstorms, the “Transformers” battles or “Fast & Furious” collisions, they all have their power and their right to exist on the big screen. There they ignite to the full, there their sound booms through the many loudspeakers. On the small screen at home, other qualities are more important. It is not for nothing that formats such as “Squid Game”, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” or “The Last of Us” often trigger hypes on streaming providers. Behind them there are no obsessively spectacularly trimmed images full of star power at an overpowering speed, but clever concepts and emotional stories with fascinating human figureswhich captivate you on the sofa – and that’s what you need, especially when you’re supposed to tune in week after week, as with “Citadel”.

There are currently discussions in the USA about whether it will be legally possible in the future to do without screenwriters altogether in film productions and to only have films or series written via GPT chat or other AI technologies. The bad news: With such stale and generic actions and dialogues as in “Citadel”, an AI couldn’t make it much worse.

A new episode “Citadel” appears always on Fridays on Amazon Prime Video.