The Witcher started as a series of fantasy novels written by Polish author, Andrzej Sapkowski, in 1992. The series currently has 8 books, with the chronologically first installment, The Last Wish, boasting a 4.19/5 stars from over 111,000 ratings on Goodreads. The series received a video game adaptation entitled, The Witcher, in 2007. It was a hit and had two sequels with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt winning IGN’s Game of the Year award in 2015. This is all to say that there has been an incredible world built for Geralt of Rivia, providing many well-received versions for people to consume and cement in their minds as to how The Witcher should look and feel. This review is being written having not read any of the books or played any of the games, so Netflix’s The Witcher from showrunner, Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, is my first look into the world of Geralt of Rivia.
Netflix’s first episode is largely about a successful siege on the castle of Cintra by the Nilfgaard army, which leads to young Princess Cirilla running away in search of Geralt of Rivia, having never met him. Her grandmother, Queen Calanthe, tells the young princess that it is her destiny to find him and sends her off with a guard before all is lost. The season follows Princess Cirilla’s (Freya Allan) obstacle-ridden quest to find Geralt, Geralt of Rivia’s (Henry Cavill) rise to infamy and then to fame through hunting monsters, and a mage named Yennefer of Vengerberg (Anya Chalotra) as she develops her abilities and influence. These three, often separate, storylines make up the season. Princess Cirilla is on the run in a ruthless world with the army of Nilfgaard after her. Geralt is a witcher, a powerful mutant made to hunt the monsters of the world. He often finds himself combating those monsters as well as his own values, such as never making a decision for the reason of choosing a “lesser evil.” Yennefer is recruited by a court of mages and develops her latent power to organize chaos, which leads to her gaining great power but leaves her feeling unfulfilled.
These three storylines are mostly independent, with small overlaps, which perhaps is the series’s most notable shortcoming. The stories are intertwined, but the structure was confusing enough that I watched all eight episodes a second time with the main goal of ensuring I understood the timeline. These storylines all take place at different times and move forward at different paces. The telling moments of where we fall in the world’s timeline are not always the most clear, as they often rely on us quickly learning names referenced in another characters story. On my first watchthrough, I didn’t understand that these three storylines were happening at different times until the fourth of the eight episodes, at which point I became a little frustrated and pretty confused. The first episode explains the time gap between Cirilla and Geralt by showing Queen Calanthe as Cirilla’s still youthful grandmother, and a princess in Geralt’s timeline telling him of how Princess Calanthe just won her first battle at Hochebuz as a teenager. This one sentence is the only separation between those two in the first four episodes. Yennefer’s timeline is even harder to pin down, but we know it happens over at least three decades.
These stories move quickly, but each character is independently pretty easy to follow. The structure makes it hard for us to see personal development in the characters, but it allows for us to see some of the most exciting moments in their respective adventures. We see Geralt earn his title as The Butcher of Blaviken in an incredibly choreographed and filmed battle after he is attacked in a market square and forced to kill humans against his will. We see him fight monsters, save lives, and explore a beautiful world. While we watch Geralt continue living a life as an established witcher, we watch Yennefer’s start from the very beginning, as a girl on a pig farm. She is bought by a mage for four marks, a valuation that does not escape her haunting self doubt. The mage trains her and eventually recognizes her as the best student the mage has ever had. She joins the mage’s court and for decades serves royalty as an advisor and bodyguard before going rogue and chasing her own desires and meeting Geralt. However, the strange relationship between the two is left feeling a bit forced as we are alluded to other encounters that they share, but they are not shown or discussed at length.
While The Witcher presents us with some of the most exciting and well-executed fight scenes in recent memory, the VFX, on full display with Yennefer’s magic, are often lacking. There is a magical shimmer which, sometimes, ultimately feels like a cop out. Everything built for the series is incredible. The armor and weapons, as well as the rest of the costuming, are very carefully crafted and help you feel like your in a real world. The world itself, much of it filmed in Hungary and complimented by a lovely soundtrack by Sonya Belousova, is both gorgeous and enchanting, very fitting for this fantastic story.
The people within this world, and their dialog, however, can be a bit inconsistent. Henry Cavil does an incredible job as Geralt with a stoic and direct performance, reminiscent of his performance in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. He often delivers his dialog with that same direct approach. The shortcoming of this is that it sometimes comes off as feeling unnecessarily epic, in a similar manner to Emilia Clarke’s lines as Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones, where what they say just doesn’t mean much. This direct dialog comes from other sources, too, such as in the first episode when we are supposed to get a feel for how hated witchers are by ordinary people when Geralt is warned, “We don’t want your kind here, witcher,” by a bartender right before being called a “mutant son of a bitch” by a patron. The problem with this scene is it just doesn’t represent what we see the rest of the series. Geralt, even before finding fame with the help of a bard named Jaskier (Joey Batey) who sings tales of Geralt’s heroic feats, is often hired for killing monsters plaguing the lives of citizens. The first episode opens with a very aesthetically dark scene, which is only really matched one more time in the series. Unfortunately, this means the first episode doesn’t really set a mood or tone for the series, but it does start the story in an exciting place.
Overall, The Witcher is a very exciting story, told in a fantastically designed world, by well-cast actors, but it could do with a less inhibiting story structure. There is room to improve, but Netflix knew they were onto something as they have already confirmed season 2. I happily watched the season a second time for this review and have every intention of playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, an idea shared with many others on Steam, as well as listening to Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Last Wish as an audiobook while I eagerly await season two.