Pros and Cons of the 2007 War and Peace adaptation
PROS
- Casting. I think the casting here is very good. You do have the occasional flop (Ken Duken for Anatole) and we’re still looking at the “blonde Natasha” problem, but IMO Poesy makes a better Natasha than James, so… I’m meh on the Nikolai, too. But overall this is one of my favorite castings. (Helene, Andrei, Pierre and Maria are especially on point.)
- Pacing. The pacing is well handled. One of my biggest issues with the BBC adaptation is how much they’re rushing everything. On the other hand, an older adaptation, like the Soviet one, has extremely slow and sometimes tedious pacing. I think 2007 does well with keeping the pacing dynamic but still leaving breathing room and time for things to sink in.
- Faithfulness to canon/”extra” material. A lot of the non-canon scenes are added either for the purposes of fleshing out things that are skimmed over/implied in the text or to accommodate for that breathing room in the pacing that I mentioned. Almost never are they there simply for shock value. Sometimes there’s exposition that is made in these scenes. A lot of the time, the extra material is both entertaining and not out of character. For example, the flirtation between Dolokhov and Helene is done a lot more plausibly and tastefully than what BBC did. Another example: the extra scenes during the Anatole/Natasha affair generally are well done and help the audience really get emotionally involved with the situation, allow it some breathing room. Canon scenes/dialogue are typically respected. They’re not always verbatim and obviously some cuts/alterations need to be made sometimes, but I never got this feeling that the screenwriters were trying to re-invent the wheel (ie: re-write all the canon scenes). Characterization is mostly faithful. Exceptions apply (but really, it’s mostly Anatole).
CONS
- Faithfulness to canon/”extra” material. On the other hand, some of the “new” material is not very good at all and messes with characterization (see: Anatole’s ridiculous revenge plot and pretty much his entire characterization. Also a “surprise” fix-it pare-the-spares ending for two characters, which is weird af, but it’s really just a mention on the other hand, so… IDK, I got over it quickly. Helene and her French officer and the way she dies is controversial, if you ask me. It’s not horrendously out of character but it’s a change from canon which I don’t think needed to be made and that I, personally, don’t agree with).
- Amount of material included. It’s only four episodes and the series takes its time with things, so a lot of things get cut. Like, for example, there’s no Boris at all in this adaptation. There’s a definite trade off here with focusing on fewer things/characters/plotlines but giving them more room to breathe and develop and sink in. But the cuts to scenes and plotlines and characters is a little saddening, I’ll admit to that.