House of David2025

With Season 2 only improving on the first season, the future of House of David looks bright.

This has some strong elements. Very interesting story, deeply classic - obviously. The performances seemed fantastic. The first episode was pretty good. It was unfortunately marred early with critical script failures like revealing a giant and his tension building forshadowing out of order. ( I.e.reveal big bad THEN show his handprint high up on the wall to build a sense of dread - dumb dumb dumb ) Also unforgivably stupid was the direction of the depiction of violence. Here was a real opportunity to thematically show the horror of historically accurate combat and instead we get barrel bottom martial arts slop. A real missed opportunity. For anyone with brains and interest the combat scenes are immersion-breakingly stupid. Sadly they begin to pepper them throughout, apparently in an effort to masculinize the show and it seriously detracts from the production. For future, to anyone making a show with these themes in which violence shouldn't be romanticized : scenes of violence need to be very brief and very horrifying. Scenes of war need to be awful, grating and grueling. Extended shots of pushing, legs cut around shields, stumbling over bodies, mud, dust, burning hair. Injured men stabbing people in the back after being passed over etc. Not this hero anime slop. People using swords on one another try really hard not to do it face to face. They are used like knives, any way BUT face to face fencing. If fencing happens it is a jump scare. Watch real fencing. Short swords like the ancients are even dirtier and faster fights than rapiers. Anyway I couldn't make it past episode 3 sparring scene, had to turn it off as the not serious people in production showed their hand full.

Even though House Of David will likely appeal to faith-based audiences, it still hasn’t been able to make its Biblical characters into people 21st century audiences can connect with.