Kaleidoscope (Netflix) Review

The past year has seen some of the biggest hits in Netflix's history, including Stranger Things Season 4, Dahmer -- Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and 1899. Now, the streamer has a new crime-inspired puzzle series to hunker down with this winter: Kaleidoscope, which premiered January 1 and lets viewers choose the order they watch episodes in.

The eight-episode limited series centers on a real-life case in which seventy billion dollars in bearer bonds went missing. The show follows a mastermind (Breaking Bad and The Mandalorian's Giancarlo Esposito) who pulls together a team of thieves to rob a vault filled with the bonds. The series is unique in that each viewer can enter the story at different points, starting with yellow ("6 Weeks Before"), then pink ("6 Months After"), green "24 Years Before" and blue ("The Heist").

As a result, the episode order and pacing vary. But all eight episodes build to the final episode, white: the heist, in which the vault is broken into. The non-linear format also allows viewers to see what the characters were thinking in a particular point in time, which makes for some truly fascinating storytelling.

While I'm not particularly enamoured of the idea of a show that turns itself into a kind of ergodic fiction, like Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves or even a Choose Your Own Adventure, I do appreciate the way Garcia and his team have built in some fun misdirects to make the shuffled episodes compelling and entertaining. And while the heist plot may not be anything new, it's still a slickly told and suspenseful one.

The actors, led by Esposito and The Mandalorian's Paz Vega, are all solid as well.  ดูหนังออนไลน์  may be criminals, but they aren't beyond feeling and there are proper emotional stakes to the story, especially in the scenes between Leo and his estranged daughter Hannah. The cast is rounded out by the likes of Rufus Sewell, Jai Courtney and Rosaline Elbay, who all bring something interesting to the table.

Overall, the heist thriller doesn't try to say anything new, but it does offer a satisfyingly mind-bending experience that is best enjoyed when you take your time and enjoy the jumbled timelines. It's a good reminder that, no matter how hard you try to rewrite your past, the consequences are inescapable. It's another fun non-linear experiment from Netflix that is just waiting to be binged.