Thursday, February 27, 2020

For Your Viewing Pleasure - "Hunters"

Amazon Prime has been funding its own video productions in recent years. Their latest offering is titled Hunters. The story concept is that the current year is 1977 and surviving Nazis (actual WW II Nazis) succeeded in smuggling themselves into the United States as well as other countries (S. America receives brief mention in the dialogue) in the immediate post-war years in far greater numbers than anyone realizes. They have successfully recruited younger members into their iteration of the Nazi Party, and have seemingly securely established themselves in the USA in order to create a Fourth Reich.

Opposing them are surviving Jews from the same WW II years (many of them, at least, being holocaust survivors), along with the younger members of their organization (it's not clear if all of the group are Jewish, though that does seem to be a dominating membership qualification), who pursue the Nazis from motives of retribution ("The best revenge is revenge.") making them the titular Hunters. The (in 1977 still highly classified Project Paperclip) presence of "legal" Nazis in the US, many of them in government occupations, who are guarded after a fashion by US government/military organizations, but are apparently regarded as enemies by the illegal Nazis, further complicates the plot in an entirely plausible fashion so far.

I've deliberately paced my watching schedule to no more than one episode a night, but having watched Ep. 1, I can say that the story is framed such as to give plot lines seemingly ample scope of field (so far ranging from NYC to Cape Canaveral, FL), characters are not too over-the-top (the writer(s) apparently think it is necessary to make it a tad bit overly obvious that, indeed, Nazis are "bad guys"), and nothing plot or character wise seems too overly contrived so far (one scene involving a bad Nazi killing a good Nazi - that reads sooo weird - by sabotaging her shower to gas her to death pushes the boundary of suspended disbelief right to the teetering edge), but hopefully future seasons will include a few more pragmatic viewpoints in the writers room (a more senior bad Nazi admonishing a junior bad Nazi on risking attracting unwanted attention to themselves by extravagant killing methods - "dead is sufficient; we don't want to send a message" - would largely suffice, I think).

If you have Amazon Prime, I strongly recommend you add this one to your My Stuff viewing list.

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