Author's rating:
THECoronavirus emergency that hit the country it has spared no one, not even the cinemas. The most immediate consequence has been that the public goes to the cinema less than usual, stays at home and watches more television. The Auditel audience figures confirm it: in the last ten days viewers grew more than 10%. Even the distributors have taken note of it and, at least for this week, there are no releases of particularly significant titles.
Then we offer you Hunters, a "television" title distributed just a few days ago on the platform Amazon Prime Video (first season consisting of 10 episodes). It is a story largely drawn from memories of real events both in the Nazi concentration camps and after the end of the war when the search for criminals who managed to escape from Germany took place in different parts of the world. There was a real "hunt" and the most famous tormentor hunter was Simon Wiesenthal who, contrary to what is seen on the screen, always sought legal ways to bring to justice the perpetrators of the worst atrocities that have ever been accomplished in the history of mankind.
Hunters begins around the 70s in New York, when a young Jew is first attacked in the street for his religious faith and then, back home, he witnesses the murder of his grandmother by a stranger. He thus comes into contact with Meyer Offerman, played by Al Pacino in great form, at the head of an organization in charge of tracking down and eliminating the Nazis who had taken refuge in the United States in previous years. Thus it turns out that, starting after the war, a clandestine organization had been created with the aim of founding a Fourth Reich. The story unfolds along this line, interspersing fragments of stories that actually happened and referring to real characters and insertions of pure fantasy that have also raised some controversy. The clash is frontal and direct: good against absolute evil, justice (not vengeance as claimed in the story, taking up Wiesenthal's own thought) required by the more than 6 million people killed by the madness of Nazi-fascism.
The writing, conceived by David Weil, is effective, tight, careful and detailed even if, as we have written, in some parts it gives a lot to the spectacular and to the special effects (see the dance sequence in the third episode). It often follows a well-known cinematographic model: Inglourious Basterds by Quentin Tarantino from 2009 where a group of American soldiers is parachuted behind the German lines with the task of organizing an attack against Hitler. In fact there are insertions in some excessively "cartoonish" passages that would like to lighten some sequences of particular violence and harshness.
There is no doubt that it is a new model of visual storytelling. There is a noticeable difference between the television story and the cinematic one, where the former requires more "contained" times and script settings than the latter which instead can enjoy a more complete breath. The awareness that we are witnessing "episodes" and that at the end of each one another will follow is very different from watching a film which in any case has its own starting point and an ending point. Another evaluation instead refers to the "genre" of this product. It's not just about "history" and even less of a visual reconstruction of real events. Nor is it a question of "fantastory" although the fundamentals of the narration are solid and irrefutable (except for inventing situations, such as the human chess match, which do not appear to have taken place).
Perhaps it is precisely in this difficulty of cataloging that the terms of his interest emerge. The complex, eternal and difficult interweaving between revenge and justice, whether public or private, still does not seem to be fully resolved in the rationality of Western thought and it certainly cannot be a television product to settle the debate. Certainly knowing that so many perpetrators of atrocities, of cruelty beyond the limits of the worst of fantasies, have been able to enjoy impunity and complicity of various kinds and that, still today, someone can still think of reproposing something like this raises great problems. Hunters helps us to remember that, precisely, Absolute Evil is always around the corner and, if only for this, it is good to always have this in mind.
