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- #Around the world in 80 days book full#
- #Around the world in 80 days book series#
- #Around the world in 80 days book tv#
Teens and adults can watch this one together and speculate the fate of the unlikely trio as they race to circumnavigate the globe in record time. His humiliation, his agony, and his experience of pure thrill are engrossing.
#Around the world in 80 days book series#
Like the reboot of Sherlock, liberties are taken with this remake, which sometimes succeed and sometimes distract (the theme music is nearly identical in both shows, too).ĭavid Tennant, as always, is a pleasure to watch - without his craft, this series would be less satisfying. His fellow travelers are also haunted by inadequacies and regrets, which enriches their bonds as they take on new challenges. Fogg attempts to overcome his cowardice by taking on a challenge he's sure he cannot face.
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This time, though, there's added urgency to the story - not only are the characters in a hurry to traverse the world in record time to win a bet, but they have demons of their own to overcome. When you look at a series like ZeroZeroZero, shot on location in Italy, Mexico, Senegal, the US and Morocco, the authenticity leaps off the screen.There's a reason that Jules Verne's novel has been made and re-made over the decades - it's a riveting adventure tale, and this version is no exception. The joy of the source text for readers was that it was truly exotic, hopping from Egypt to India, China, Japan and across the USA. A scene of mass revolution is conveyed with a still shot of Paris and some audio. In every frame, you can sense corners being cut. London and Paris look nearly identical here, perhaps both shot on the same block in Romania. Audiences are wise to tricks you might once have got away with.
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If you’re taking on a property as famous as Around the World in 80 Days and putting it on BBC One at Christmas, you have to give it some welly.
#Around the world in 80 days book tv#
The bigger problem is that the scope and budget of modern TV has outgrown this kind of production.
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Fogg’s valet, Passepartout, is a black man, played by a French-Malian actor, Ibrahim Koma.
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The illusion doesn’t last long: although it is set in the 19th century, it strains for contemporary relevance. Still, for the first few minutes of Victorian gloom, it looks like it might be a straight retelling, a rare occurrence in today’s TV world of near-mandatory “reinvention” and “reimagining”. By the end of the first episode, you wonder if this is simply Tennant breaking character and wondering what he is doing in this rather incoherent, cheap-looking version of such a thrilling novel. Before he decides to take up the £20,000 wager to race around the world, he spends most of his time staring at his fellow clubmen with a vacant expression, as though his mind were endlessly somewhere else. In the BBC’s new version, Phileas Fogg ( David Tennant) is a still, silent figure. Nellie Bly was a 19th-century American journalist who was told it would be impossible for her to make it around the world in 80 days like the fictional. The air is heavy with the stale whiff of empire but we are alive to the possibilities of the great expedition that will follow.
#Around the world in 80 days book full#
The year is 1872 and men sit around London’s Reform Club, bored out of their minds and stuffed full of bad food. Around the World in 80 Days has one of the great openings in Victorian literature.
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