The Underground Railroad

Man this was disappointing. Barry Jenkins is one of the best directors around today, so I was very excited for him to do something like this.  Cinematography wise, it’s masterful. The original score portion of the music is also fantastic. Most of the acting is also pretty decent, Joel Edgerton is fantastic as usual and Irone Singleton did great in his small role. The production design and all that, great. The story is pretty lackluster and the way he decided to tell it is stupendous. This 10 episode series could be cut down to maybe 6 and still have everything shown. The Fanny Briggs episode was absolutely useless. The pilot episode started extremely confusing. (Idk if it was his intention to make it that disorientating, but it still didn’t work).  And don’t get me started on the credits music for each episode. After a emotional conclusion to an episode, childish gambino starts to play over the credits. I can see what he was trying to do with the modern hip hop music for the credits, but it alleviates all emotion from the episode.  Episode 9 was really well done however, so idk what happened. This could’ve been a masterpiece of long form drama.  If you want something similar to this, but done to perfection, stick with 12 years a slave. I cannot stress how good that original score is though.