All the Light We Cannot See 2023 / A stunning adaptation whose decent performances can’t hold up the novel’s striking prose

With the source material being a Pulitzer winning novel, All The Light We Cannot See had high expectations. Plenty of what made the novel great was its straightforward prose, as well as its back-and-forth timeline, where each scene is arranged not by chronological order, but by the thematic logic that informs the characters’ actions. The new Netflix adaptation keeps the novel’s structure, however, the novel’s poetry is lost as the metaphors are shortened to its most cliché versions, and the showrunners couldn’t trust that the viewers would acknowledge the novel’s subtleties. While the cast does what it can, the show just feels like a missed opportunity to tell an excellent story.