It... is.. just... TOO... TEDIOUS... TO... WATCH... SOBER It took me two time to get through the first episode, due to falling asleep. Everything is excruciatingly slow... the camera pans, the dialog, character walking, even the coke whore! It's what I'd expect from a movie made by a postal service, or DMV employee. Every... single... insignificant... moment... is... punctuated... by... a... dramatic... pause! I tried. I really tried. But about 10 minutes into the second episode, and I was just getting peeved. I couldn't take another hour and a half of it! Maybe if someone was doing speed ball, it might work... cocaine to stay awake, and heroin to keep from slitting your own throat!

If you can't fall asleep in your bed, this is the perfect sleeping pill. I've never seen a show so slow. Will I resist until the end of the third episode.

This series is gorgeous visually, but it's also absolutely impossible to follow. People do stuff, then nothing is happening, then something kinda starts to happen, but you're already bored and distracted. I get that slow pacing is Refn's shtick, but the story and the viewer really could have benefited from making all episodes 45 min or so. There's just enough material for that length.

I know it feels terrible to have wasted 13 precious hours of your life on this, but I can’t believe there are actually people defending this show. It felt just like yet another provocation from NWR. Most episodes are almost 90 minutes long, yet they have 15 minutes worth of footage. The rest is long silences, static shots with slow pullbacks, endless dollies across the landscapes as people walk around, semi-disjointed conversations, fuck, drive, eat pie, masturbate, or kill someone we don’t even know. The photography is gorgeous as usual, but as it always looks kind of the same, you get tired of it pretty fast. Sometimes shots are so dark and saturated that I couldn’t understand what was going on. There is a lot of gruesome violence, but as with the rest, habituation kicks in pretty fast. I guess that at least up to a certain point the “plot” was alright, even though there is no narrative structure whatsoever. It’s like cinematic diarrhea: what comes out comes out, in no particular order. There are two main storylines happening simultaneously, but instead of alternating scenes from each character as most TV shows, Refn had this insane idea of dedicating full episodes to either storyline and amplifying this awful sense of having spent hours to get nowhere (remember, each episode is as long as a feature film and less content than a Youtube prank video). It gets a little better after the first couple of episodes, mainly due to the consistently hypnotic atmosphere that sucks you in, and especially that one absurd scene in each episode that wakes you up from the nihilist numbness, the most memorable ones being: 1) A random Korean dude goes to borrow money from the Japanese mafia and gets his finger chipped off with a katana by Hideo Kojima: 2) A guy’s severed hands left in the middle of the room as we listen to reggae; 3) William Baldwin making tiger noises and masturbating in his own movie theater: 4) The bad guys unable to find the right song to listen on the radio during a car chase; 5) The fascist police department performing the Passion of Christ with a broom and the Eucharist with potato chips. By the way, even though a few characters’ arcs got inevitably closed, there is no ending and there won’t be a second season. Too bad because I was at least looking forward to seeing everyone die.

If they would act any slower they would be standing still. More than once I checked my pc because I thought the image froze.