TV Review: THE WITCHER: BLOOD ORIGIN
By Charles Phipps
With the recent release of THE WITCHER: SIRENS OF THE DEEP and the upcoming THE WITCHER season four with the controversial replacement of Henry Cavill by Liam Hemsworth, I thought it was worthwhile revisiting one of the more troubled productions of Netflix's adaptation of Andrzej Sapwkowki's seminal franchise. Specifically, THE WITCHER: BLOOD ORIGIN, a fantasy miniseries created by Declan de Barra and Lauren Schmidt Hissrich that details the fall of the elven civilization before the arrival of humanity.
It is not good.
At all.
The WItcher: Blood Origin sort of represents the nadir of what big budget fantasy adaptations became after Game of Thrones heyday around Season Four or so. Netflix was never interested in The Witcher books. They were interested in the massively successful video game franchise based on the books (and created by actual fans when CD Projekt Red was a bunch of college kids in a basement).
Netflix didn't get the rights to the video games but tried, with mixed results, to adapt the books while constantly changing things to appeal to the broadest audience possible and frequently making the mistake of doing what critics of grimdark fantasy claim grimdark authors do: making things darker for shock value than story. I could get into these but that would be a whole different article. Instead, it simply establishes that Netflix didn't want to faithfully adapt the books and instead just wanted their own Game of Thrones. The Witcher: Blood Origins exemplifies this and is dragged down by the problems inherent to this attitude.
The premise is Jaskier (Joey Batey) is contacted by a mysterious figure, Seanchai, who relates to him the story of seven warriors who overthrew an evil empire. If that already starts you feeling, "Haven't I heard this before?" then you better buckle up because you ain't seen nothing yet. I feel bad here because Joey Batey is always entertaining even with the worst of the Witcher material and all I could think of during the movie was I'd rather see him than most of this plot. Indeed, I wished they could have time traveled Jaskier back because then the movie at least would have had someone providing stakes.
It's hard to explain why The Witcher: Blood Origin is so off-putting, but a good introduction would be the fact that elves in Sapkowski's work are a bunch of indigenous people. The elves have their own dark history and have been crushed by racism as well as colonialism. This takes place when the elves are at their height, everyone with rubber ears, and pretty much acting like humans. It's wholly removed from pretty much all of Sapkowski's writings save the occasional Easter Egg and feels far more generic in its depiction of a "fantasy land." There's an evil queen (Mirren Mack), the evil queen's ex-lover (Laurence O'Fuarain), an evil wizard advisor (Lenny Henry), and a dueling set of agendas over which bad guy will take over the world(s) first.
I don't want to run down the cast because I feel like everyone is trying to bring character to a competent-at-best paperback fantasy plot. Like, if I read this as a novel in the Nineties after paying five bucks at a Waldenbooks, I wouldn't hate it. When I say it feels like someone's Dungeons and Dragons campaign, which I do, that isn't an insult. Unfortunately, it feels massively disrespectful to take another artist's world and then just dump your creation in the backstory in hopes no one notices.
To give you a sense of how rote The Witcher: Blood Origin is, the story follows Fjall (O'Fuarain) as a beefy warrior who is in love with the princess of the elves, Merwyn (Mack), who isn't as nice a person as he thinks he is. After a coup, he hooks up with Eile (Sophia Brown), who is trying to avenge her dead clan. They build their adventuring party up to eventually launch an assault on the evil royals while Chief Druid Balor (Lenny Henry) plans to harness supernatural power to invade other realities. Why? Because they're evil and apparently one world is not enough.
I don't hate any of the characters, well maybe revenge-seeking Meldorf the Dwarf because they introduce her as a dwarf without ever engaging with what role dwarves play in this elven-dominated world, but everything is so paint by the numbers. This is a show with Michelle Yeoh as an inexplicable martial arts master like Obi Wan or Yoda. Someone who also, you guessed it, wants revenge. Revenge is defaulted to in every case for character motivations because the writers can't think of anything better like idealism or just plain cash.
The Witcher: Blood Origin lacks all the moral ambiguity, world-building, complicated politics, and deep characters of the books. It's a bunch of stock characters in a vague Seven Samurai and Star Wars-esque plot that would have done Zach Snyder's Rebel Moon proud. If it were an original property, I would have given it a C or maybe even a C+. Instead, it just feels like the shameless cash grab it is.
