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Authors: Ben K. <benk@tilde.team>
Date: 2020-12-28
Barbarians (original title: Barbaren) is a 2020 German historical war drama television series created by Andreas Heckmann, Arne Nolting and Jan Martin Scharf and starring Laurence Rupp, Jeanne Goursaud and David Schütter.
So my wife and I just finished watching this series, and I have to say it was alright.
93% liked this TV show
Despite the high ratings it apparently received, I found it just very slightly lacking in some intangible way. Is the concept very interesting? Yes. Is the production good? Yes, fairly. However, I felt like it was just a little over-played.
I don't know what kind of budget it had, because some aspects of it make you think that it certainly had a high budget, but at other times you think no. Sometimes the costumes and props are superb like you'd expect, and at other times there were scenes where you felt that something was just slightly off about the clothing, like it looked just a little too modern for something from two millennia ago. They might have cut corners just a tiny bit.
The story is a little bit too simple, to the point where they seemed to have trouble stretching it over eight episodes, or they squandered some opportunities. Characters were not that deep, I felt, and maybe there was a slight pacing issue. At times it felt melodromatic and running the risk of being cliché, like they were trying to squeeze too much emotion out of it even though it started to come off as a bit shallow.
I think it's best understood as a mini-series rather than a full-blown thing. The fact that much of the dialog in Latin is rightly awesome, and the series gained well-earned attention for that. History buffs are fond of pointing out how the Germanic language that should be spoken in it isn't, but everyone understands why they'd film in modern German, because obviously it's meant for Germans to watch and understand.
One thing that interests me is that the show seems to present some small opportunity to interpret it in a way that might be critical towards today's white supremacists. Actually the show doesn't really deal with themes of race or anything like that, but it basically presents the picture of Rome being the bad guy and the Germanic tribesmen as being (for the most part) the "good guys".
The viewer is clearly led to sympathize very strongly with the Germans, who are also portrayed as "uncivilized" compared to Rome, like primitive and wild. This gave me pause to think about how today's white supremacists seem to adopt the position of Rome, of being part of the "great civilization" and the civilizing force that deserves to conquer the world.
I wonder if any white supremacist watching this show (and I'm sure it must be popular among them) will catch on to the fact that they are more like the Romans today than the Germans being portrayed in it, who may as well be Afghan tribesman as Germanic ones, or Iraqi villagers, etc. When they demand the Muslim immigrants "assimilate" and abandon their own religion and culture/language/community, will they see that they are being today's Rome?
I guess they probably won't. I'd like to think that the show could be some kind of subtle propaganda against these people, but I doubt they will read it that way. They'll probably do plenty of mental gymnastics around my proposed analogy to make sure they don't see it that way. However, maybe the argument could be thrust upon them if we assume they have seen it and are unprepared to hear that analysis of it.