All the Light We Cannot See (2023) * * (streaming on Netflix)

 

Directed by: Shawn Levy

Starring:  Aria Mia Loberti, Louis Hofmann, Felix Kammerer, Hugh Laurie, Mark Ruffalo, Lars Eidinger, Marion Bailey

Marie Leblanc (Loberti) is a blind teenager transmitting illegal radio broadcasts in the waning days of the Nazi occupation of France in 1944.  She calls out for her missing father Daniel (Ruffalo) and Uncle Etienne (Laurie), both members of the French resistance, speaking in secret codes to the Allies hidden in her reading of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  Her broadcasts are picked up by German teenager Werner Pfennig (Hofmann), who has been listening on this frequency since his days in an orphanage, but the person speaking back then was a mysterious professor whose words gave him hope.  Werner, due to his genius working with radios, is soon scooped up into the Nazi war machine.  

There is nothing Werner displays which shows us that it takes an expert to do what he does.  Germany apparently had a whole curriculum dedicated to taking apart and putting together radios.  An average electrician could fix wires and find frequencies.  Werner is enthralled with Marie's voice, while Reinhold (Eidinger), a poor man's Hans Landa who tracks people for the Gestapo, searches for Marie because he believes a precious stone which would cure his fatal illness and grant him eternal life is in her possession.  

Daniel is missing, while Etienne works out of the back of a bakery in the port town of Saint Malo, France, which is where the bulk of All the Light We Cannot See takes place.  Most of the battle scenes in the series are clearly phony CGI, while the dramatic scenes are jumbles of words faking some sort of profundity.  The professor speaks of "the light we cannot see", which sounds deep, but what does it actually mean?   The series lasts four episodes, which is three more than it needs.  The human stakes are awfully low for a World War II drama with Nazi villains and moral, decent heroes.  All the Light We Cannot See, based on a Pulitzer-prize winning novel, might have come more alive on the page than it does in this mini-series.  After the final scene, I asked myself, is there all there is?