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The Luminaries is set in the time of the 1860s gold rush, on the ‘wild West’ coast of New Zealand’s South Island.
Eve Hewson plays Anna Wetherell, a typical ‘naive character in a drama’ who’s looking for a man called Staines. First name, Seaman? No, it’s just the surname for Emery (Himesh Patel – Yesterday), the man with whom the billing suggests she’s destined to be with, even though they have about as much chemistry as two farts in a bathtub. Still, the scenery’s nice, eh?
That said, Anna has as much personality as a dunk in a Bristol harbour, while Lydia (Eva Green – Casino Royale, Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children) makes herself sound very rich and la-de-da when she introduces herself to Anna, paying her complements and inviting her to a soirée that evening,
Along the way, it goes back and forth in time slightly, as we see Anna locked up in a cell, and then she’s not. She’s been framed for a crime she didn’t commit – rather like The A-Team.
Elsewhere, Lydia spills Anna a mad yarn about how if you’re born on not just the day and time, but at the exact same instant as someone else, then your fates are intertwined and you’re destined to be together, and this is what links Anna and Emery… Tell that to a girl in my class at school who had the same birthday as me, but who had zero interest in me.
There’s also a load of nonsense in about Lydia trying to ensure that Anna and Emery never meet in the first place… it confused the hell out of me and was just tedious.
Add in a load of supernatural guff, and it’s rare that an episode of a TV drama gets zero marks, but… congratulations The Luminaries, you’ve achieved this as there are no redeeming features to this whatsoever. Okay, so there’s Eva Green, but you can see her in a zillion other better things.
If you enjoyed it, then although it’s on tomorrow evening, it then continues every Sunday at 9pm on BBC1.
The Luminaries continues tomorrow night at on BBC1 at 9pm, and is available to pre-order on DVD, ahead of the release date of July 20th.
You can also buy the paperback novel.
You can also watch the entire series now on the BBC iPlayer.
Episode 1 Score: 0/10
Director: Claire McCarthy
Producers: Lisa Chatfield
Screenplay / Novel: Eleanor Catton
Music: David Long
Cast:
Lydia Wells: Eva Green
Anna Wetherell: Eve Hewson
Emery Staines: Himesh Patel
Francis Carver: Marton Csokas
Crosbie Wells: Ewen Leslie
Dick Mannering: Erik Thomson
George Shepard: Callan Mulvey
Alistair Lauderback: Benedict Hardie
Te Rau Tauwhare: Richard Te Are
Cowell Devlin: Matt Whelan
Joseph Pritchard: Matthew Sunderland
Ben Lowenthal: Joel Tobeck
Quee Long: Gary Young
Aubert Gascoigne: Paolo Rotondo
Charlie Frost: Byron Coll
Thomas Balfour: Mark Mitchinson
Sook Yongsheng: Yoson An
Harald Nilssen: Erroll Shand
Edgar Clinch: Kieran Charnock
Graves: Charlie Corrigan
Sinclair: Nic Sampson
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.