Seriously, I am so upset about what I just watched.
Valjean is written as a callous judgemental unfeeling prick (and i don’t care if they were trying to play it off that well, he had other things like the inspector who just watched him yeet a cart on his mind, that is bull),who only seems to do the right thing when he is confronted with how truly awful he is and how terrible he’s made everything...and it is all DIRECTLY his fault here, no bones about it. And it doesn’t work, it’s not good, it is not Valjean at all.
Fantine gets dragged through all the worst of torture porn, it might as well be game of thrones (except that there were no boobs), for no reason other than Davies made it happen, and it was disgusting and awful and unnecessary.Yes, the things that happen are all terrible, but this was brutal and it all happened in five minutes, so you didn’t even get to sympathise, you just sat feeling like you were being slapped over and over.
MARIUS IS NOT SUPPOSED TO GET TO SEE HIS FATHER BEFORE HE DIES. And even if they did want to give him that (although i think it would have ben a HUGE mistake), he has to be a young man. He’s all of six? Eight? Who the hell knows? But it’s going to make a huge mess later and all the ways i see out of that mess suck.
This adaptation has absolutely no sense of time. When a two hour musical can make you feel like years have passed with a little bit of clever walking and 32 bars of music, but you can’t make it feel like a week’s gone by over the course of and hour You Are Doing It Wrong.
You know what. I might not have been happy about this in any timeline, but don’t dare tell me that all the past things i have loved are crap and you know better and are going to be the most accurate thing ever known to man when you clearly don’t have the most basic understanding of things like...the entire flipping theme. This is a story about compassion, and love, and humanity, and selflessness, and so far it’s all been a display of anger and cruelty and...well...Ego. And I, for one, am pretty disgusted. And Vicky would be INCENSED. You know he would.
