Marco Polo (2014)

A fun, body-flinging, old-fashioned epic.... As Kublai Khan, British actor Benedict Wong gives an impressive performance, one of the best of the year: You absolutely believe his ruthlessness, his power and his calculating thoughtfulness. As Marco Polo, on the other hand, Italian actor Lorenzo Richelmy, who looks like a more lyrical Emile Hirsch, mostly has to be put up with.

Marco Polo flits between storytelling styles without completely tying them together as successfully as "Game of Thrones" does.... By the fifth and sixth episodes the action picks up, the intrigue deepens and the stakes some higher.

Shot primarily in Kazakhstan and Malaysia, the series is richly atmospheric, lavishly produced, and artfully rendered. But you may find that the whole is less than the sum of its parts. It doesn't work nearly as well as drama as it does as sheer spectacle.

Creatively, it’s just a middling mess--something so average that a basic cable channel could have duplicated it without all the foreign travel for about $84 million less.

A dull period drama without characters to care about or a narrative in which to invest.

The show suffers from a profound lack of momentum and meaning, with plots and subplots that are stiff and predictable.

Marco Polo might best be utilized as a sedative or sleeping pill. All those dark to pitch black exteriors and interiors seem guaranteed to prompt an onset of heavy eyelids if not a complete conk-out. And if that doesn’t get you, the ponderous pace almost certainly will.

I love the action , the mongolian and the chinese colture. The series is not that long so you can watch it in 2-6 days.

Amazing one of the most Underrated show i have ever seen and for real! Good actors good scenario the ost is also really nice and for once no woke shiet in this movie , No black mongolian Warlord or no Black warrior from the hollywoke fantasy.

Overall, this show was a very good production and most aspects were convincing. The storytelling kind of entangles the viewer with the story by struggle. You struggle with the characters, their decisions, so that ultimately, you hope for some bright moments in the story, some resolve. Regardless, the show has been canceled due to its huge costs.

One of the few great/interesting netflix series ever created and It is bloody cancelled tells alot about filthy netflix and their agenda

Utter garbage, and a striking case of white gaze in media. This show meanders through two seasons, struggling to give its white male lead anything to do (as it constantly wastes our time by depicting his sidequests to a main story that clearly has nothing to do with him), teasing us with much more interesting characters played by fairly competent actors like Benedict Wong, and coming off as extremely low budget because of the sheer amount of shortcuts they took with every setpiece (despite the series actually having a significantly larger budget than most series because of it being shot on location, making it a case of mismanagement). What I can say is genuinely malicious about the series is all the white gaze in it, with minority characters sacrificing themselves to save Marco's sorry ass time and time again, despite Marco being utterly useless in his own series. This thing also loses points for ending on a blatant cliffhanger where-in Prester John of all people (a non-existant historical figure) lays waste to Khan's empire offscreen. The series might as well have ended with a dragon coming to destroy everything.