The Luminaries Review

Based on an acclaimed novel by Eleanor Catton The Luminaries was co-production between TVNZ and the BBC.

In the 1860s the West Coast Gold Rush brought many immigrants to New Zealand’s South Island. Two of them that arrive on the same ship are Anna Wetherell (Eve Hewson), an illiterate Irish woman, and Emery Staines (Himesh Patel), a British-Indian man. Both are astrological twins because they were born at the same time. The Gold Rush results in people getting involved in crime, murder, disputed claims, and racial tensions of the era.

The team behind The Luminaries showed a lot of ambition making the miniseries. The cast was filled with recoginisble actors. The most famous member of the cast was Eva Green who played one of the main antagonists, Hewson and Patel are actors on the rise, and there are actors like Marton Csokas and Ewen Leslie who have long filmographies. With talent like that The Luminaries had great performances with Hewson and Green being the highlights. Hewson goes through the wringer in the series: she has all her money stolen, becomes a prostitute, gets hooked on opium, and becomes pregnant. And she gets entangled with the land claims and all the problems that result. Green has always a talented actress and as Lydia Wells was a dubious character who charms Anna into working for her before showing her true colours.

The other aspect that the show does really well was the production values. Dunedin was shown to be a town that just starting its development. There were bars, hotels, banks, and clubs that were formed for the influx of people. It made the show feel like a New Zealander version of a Western, or more precisely, Deadwood. This wasn’t a show where sheriffs have to fight criminals and bandits, the focus was more about land claims and what people would do to get them. There were some historical details like the character of Sook Yongsheng (Yoson An), a Chinese immigrant whose family participated in the Opium Wars and hooked on the substance. The Chinese population suffered the most from racism and discrimination.

But The Luminaries was a problematic miniseries. The show aimed to be a magical realist show because Anna and Emery had a psychic connection that grew stronger as the series progressed. It gave Anna the sudden ability to read whilst other events had a negative effect on Emery. However, this element did not fit with the rest of the series. The show also had a focus on astrology due to Lydia’s club, but this was a part of the story was trying to force meaning when there wasn’t any. During the fifth episode, there was a voiceover highlighting the star signs of 12 male characters and what those signs meant. But some of these characters were barely shown in the series which leads to the question ‘who the hell are they?’

The worst feature of the series was its disjointed narrative. The timeline kept flipping backwards and forwards in time like it was Lost. The showrunners were thinking they were being profound, but all they do is confound. This type of storytelling made the series hard to follow and there was no sense of the timescale of events, such as Anna’s pregnancy.

The Luminaries was an ambitious show that aimed high but misses big. Whilst the visuals and acting were of a high standard most audiences will be turned off by the uninspired story and the unengaging way of it was told.