fredricwilliams

This highly improbable story might have been fun, but apparently the lack of a solid plot led the director to find a carnival of unlikely distractions intended to keep us from noticing.

So, we have a major CIA site underground. Hanna escapes to find herself in an endless desert, but after a presumably long walk, she happens upon a couple of American kids.

Despite the vast desert and lack of water, she rejects a ride and is able to walk to a convenient city and get a hotel room. Soon, so we won't be bored with the Moroccan market, we find Hanna transported by stowing away on the same van she had turned down in the desert.

Next we are in Spain, where she bumps into a girl from the middle of the desert and goes for a motorcycle ride with two young men.

A good plot is essential to a good action film. Here we have little to work with, and while we might tolerate the improbability that goes with nearly all action films, a travel film relying on improbability is far too much.

First of all, if this is based on the life of Walter O'Brien, it is best to understand that he has a B. S. from a rather ordinary college. His claim of a high IQ comes from a primary school -- and he has no proof. Although Mensa offers an IQ test, he hasn't taken it. He has a long record of making fanciful claims, usually unprovable, in some case, improbable.

I have a relatively high IQ (158) which I can prove. First of all, high IQ people usually do not make ridiculous claims that often proof fake. Little in this show strikes me as intelligent -- nearly all seems fantasy, including a pudgy Irishman involved in derring-do of all sorts. So much that is done by characters in the show is the opposite of what an intelligent person would do.

So, for me, it was difficult to watch. I kept thinking "are these people idiots?" That led me to check up on the supposed "real-life" O'Brien. My guess is he has an average IQ and so has no real idea what a genius would do.

This work absolutely lives or dies by captioning. Unless you are fluent in both Korean and Japanese, you cannot know what is happening without reading the captions.

Captioning is not a rare skill. Yet for "Pachinko" captions were not professionally done.

In these episodes, captions sometimes appear for a tiny fraction of a second -- so fast that no one would be able to read even a word. In many other cases, they are kept on the screen so briefly that readers will miss parts of the dialogue.

This is.a fine story, but there is no excuse for poor captioning -- it is a skill found easily everywhere in the world.