this is stuff you like and the Good Omens Amazon Prime adaptation does not
make me regret everything so that's a good start but mostly it makes me think
"let's declare war on good and evil? because good is just as bad as evil? wait
what?" here be spoilers for both the book and
the TV series you have been warned boy it's been a while since I reviewed
anything promptly enough that I needed to say that! I've said in a previous
review which I will link that Good Omens is a humanist apocalypse, a humanist
revelation, and it's a book that values humanity and free will above everything
else. Good Omens is a book where a demon becomes more human an angel becomes more
human the Antichrist is human and being human is a good thing, but I feel like
the Amazon Prime series ends up hammering home however unintentionally
how that doesn't really fit very well with a worldview that thinks there's
such a thing as good and evil. The end of the Good Omens book and indeed the TV
series is Crowley saying that he thinks that the next great battle will be
Heaven and Hell vs. humanity. Now the spiritual dimension as something that
needs to be defeated is something you see in Philip Pullman though he doesn't
go for heaven and hell he's more like just let's kill God which makes sense
given his religious views. But the thing is I think that a lot of people possibly
even most people believe that there is some objective standard of good and evil
that isn't just what human beings can justify to themselves how much of that
is "I am the ultimate arbiter of good and evil and everything I can justify is
obviously right and everything else that other people do which I don't like is
obviously wrong" I'm not sure but I feel like the kind of "outmoded ideas of
what's good - which is to say any opinion that I do not currently hold on what is
good - are bad in themselves and should be destroyed just as surely is everything
that I think is evil!" is kind of iffy to be honest and the idea that the ideal is
to be perfectly balanced between heaven and hell perfectly balanced between dark
and light perfectly balanced between good and evil is actually kind of
doesn't that just make you boring and useless isn't that just a bit Brave New
World where everyone's so stoned out of their mind all the time that they can't
raise themselves to great acts of good but can't lower themselves to great acts
of evil either. I liked the Good Omens adaptation quite
a lot actually but the thing that threw me out of it the most was the inclusion
of Jesus like the reminder that Jesus exists in the Good Omens universe is
enough to make you go oh oh that kind of that kind of doesn't really work for me
then. The Amazon Prime series unlike the book takes us on a tour of various
historical and Biblical events to give us an idea of the agreement that Crowley
and Aziraphale have developed and how that came to be I particularly loved the
Black Knight but it includes the scene where Crowley and Aziraphale are
watching Jesus died on the cross. Now it's a fairly obvious scene to choose
from the New Testament being one of the most theologically significant ones in
there but if the whole conceit of the novel is that everything in the Bible is
not as true but literally true from creation to the flood to the Antichrist
being like an actual person as opposed to a prophetic representation of bad
things that are happening in the 1st century AD. from a literary or cinematic
or a storytelling standpoint I feel like they'd have been better off not bringing
Jesus into it because it just reminds us that he's not there for the rest of it.
like by the rules of the universe he exists and is canonically God and
everything that was said about him in the Bible is true... in the book they talk
about the Almighty a lot and in the TV series as well but Jesus doesn't really
get a mention. The whole book is about the Antichrist but aside from an
incident where Aziraphale possesses a televangelist who has written songs like
Jesus is my buddy we don't mention why there is an anti
Christ at all. Which is kind of necessary in literary terms because if you do
mention Jesus and you get people thinking about
the theological significance of Jesus then the whole thing kind of falls apart
a little bit. A God who takes human form and endures
human mockery and torture and death in order to save humanity doesn't really
fit with the "heaven is principally composed of self-righteous jerks who
remind you of jobsworths in insurance companies" vibe but they're going for. Still
I did enjoy the series a lot and boy it has really really made me miss David
Tennant I'm not even joking there are a lot of things in it I would have done
differently I felt Gabriel's overbearing purple eyed
American-ness was a bit too on-the-nose I would definitely not have added the
bit where heaven and hell tried to kill Az and Crowley like that just felt over
the top. But as you would expect from Neil Gaiman being directly involved in
it it is a pretty faithful adaptation. the most noticeable cut for me was
Greasy Johnson and the Johnsonites, and even then you only really notice
their absence when Adam talks about seeing whose gang is best when he's
confronting the four horsemen. I feel like it still works without them because
you get his point even if you haven't had an explicit example of what he means.
and I really did like the addition of the speech to Satan at the end. "you're
not my dad" indeed. I like that the actors for the
Angels are mixed sex because you know angels don't have sex biologically
speaking unless they try really hard I enjoyed the Them fighting the four
horsemen I loved Crowley's Bentley I thought his snake eyes were a good touch
his red hair mostly didn't look terrible and Az and Crowley on screen: a joy. Such
great chemistry and it is really wonderful to have some of your favorite
scenes from books brought to life on the screen and see them just just how you
imagined them. Like that paintballing scene for one. Anathema's bicycle
accident. Anathema was great, by the way, just really loved her
I find Shadwell's accent really strange I don't know but as adaptations go there
have been many worse ones so if you have seen the Amazon Prime adaptation of Good
Omens let me know tell me what you thought, if you haven't seen it I hope
you've at least read the book so that I haven't spoiled it horribly for you, if
you'd like to see more content like this you should subscribe, and in any case I
will see you next time.