An establishing shot of Moscow from The Last Czars, a snowy photo of the Red Square in the center of Moscow, featuring Lenin’s Tomb with the text “MOSCOW, FEBRUARY 4 1905”.
I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I had not actually been to Moscow and knew what that building was. But yeah, that square,pyramid-looking thing in the middle is Lenin’s Mausoleum featured prominently in an establishing shot of a documentary about the Romanovs dated 1905. And this is the least of the issues.
The Last Czars. I have no idea how this show was made, why this was made, or who needs to be punished for making it. I will fully concede that I did ask for at least part of this pain. While I had not looked up any info before clicking on it, I could tell just from the photo and language used on the Netflix screen that it was going to be Bad. I just didn’t know How Bad.
If you are one of my 3 friends who has to hear me complain about this stuff, you will know I have multiple rants about the Romanovs and historian’s particular obsession with not just them, but how they met their end. There are some history books that will take a mere passing mention about this time and be like “BY THE WAY, DID YOU KNOW THE WHOLE FAMILY WAS MURDERED IN A BASEMENT? LET ME DESCRIBE IT FOR YOU IN FULL DETAIL OVER MULTIPLE PAGES”. But still, I am a junky for history and sometimes there’s fun little facts that find their way into these things that I haven’t heard before. This was not one of those times.
This series is 1/3 a scripted drama about some dude investigating one of the fake Anastasias in 1930. This part is probably the most out of place of the devil’s triangle of elements in this show, and yet they chose it as the starting point for the whole series. So at first, you are thinking this will be maybe a story about this with flashbacks to the story of the Romanovs. But no, instead this weird, tacked on story just kind of pops up now and again for 6 episodes. And of course there are no stakes because you know this girl isn’t Anastasia.
The second third? The 2/3? is historian talking heads popping in to say random “historical” things about what was happening, with the odd photo or video of whatever they are talking about. Which would already seem weird in a narrative story about some dude trying to decide if a girl in a hospital is Anastasia. But. But.
The third third/ 3/3 /final piece in this trash puzzle but also the main part of this series is the wholly bizarre reenactment of random scenes from the lives of the Romanovs and Rasputin. Now, I already hate reenactments in documentaries. They should be abolished. No good has ever come from a reenactment in this fashion. But this is some next-level holy shit.
So you have this weird Anastasia story that’s really just some man talking to people in a hospital a lot, and then these several minute-long scenes of graphic sex between Nicky and Alix, or Grigori and a group of women, and you just kind of sit there being really uncomfortable until some historian pops up to interrupt a nipple.
Who on this Earth was like, “You know what we need? Romanov porn. That’ll tick some boxes! Make sure you get Rasputin in there, nothing not sexy about that!” And then hundreds of more people paid money to make it. And then put it on Netflix.
Do you think any of those historians being interviewed had been given a script? Were they aware they were going to be featured in really bad history porn? I hope they were paid a decent amount. Really, I hope everyone who showed their face in it was paid a lot because yikes
The icing on the poop cake that is this series is that the history is just.. all over the place. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. There’s so much wrong with this that I was taken aback by how bad it was. Please, if you value your time, watch/read/do anything else.
My recommendation for a good read on this period would be George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I by Miranda Carter. Because I love you and I want you to read interesting stuff and not just make you morbidly curious to see what Rasputin porn looks like. Don’t do it! It is not worth it! I promise.
