I started watching the Norwegian television series ‘Occupied‘ (original ‘Okkupert’) due to Jo Nesbø appearing on the posters as one of its creators. The Norwegian author’s detective books are exciting. I watched the first season, realized in 2015, a few years ago, and now time came for the second. I’m not sure that I’ll care to see the third and final season, which premiered in Norway and Netflix about two months ago. The shortcomings of the formula adopted by the creators of the series deepened from the first to the second series, and I have a feeling that the good ideas were a bit exhausted and were replaced by clichés and uninspired story twists.
A geopolitical thriller that insists on anchoring its action in reality and bringing on screen real countries and political organizations and the politicians who lead them, always carries risks, even if it uses the pretext of anticipation. The formula was tried quite successfully by the American television. A series like ‘24‘ had a decade ago a respectable audience and a large number of fans, but was faced with the need to constantly invent great new ones to create tension and keep the attention. A similar phenomenon occurs with ‘Occupied‘. The first season was based on the idea of Norway’s ‘soft’ occupation by a Russia acting on behalf of the European Union. Cause? Counteract the actions of a Norwegian ‘green’ government that had shut off its oil supply to Europe. The original idea did not have much support in international political reality, but what happens in season two accentuates this feeling of fake. In the absence of new ideas, the creators of the second season of the series insist on personal conflicts that support their formula, but these are not interesting enough and cannot compensate for the feeling of watching a political and historical dystopia without much touch with the reality.
Norway’s specific dilemmas presented in this film may be more visible to those who know better the history and mentality of this country. All Scandinavia faced throughout the 20th century the Russian/Soviet danger, and each of the Nordic countries responded in its own way. What we see in the film is something similar to what happened in post-war Finland, and the Norwegian dilemma is choosing the least bad solution between ‘Finlandization’ and war, given the historical trauma of the German occupation and the Quisling government’s collaboration during WWII. However, there is little awareness of all these in this series, which emphasizes the action at an alert pace, similar to the style of American TV series. The result is not bad, the acting performance is very good, the cinematography is professional, but I personally could not escape the feeling of fake. Too many details I know about Europe and the way European institutions work contradict what is shown in this film. The very accuracy of the details, the credible descriptions of the background and the good understanding of the political and judicial procedures that I appreciate in Jo Nesbø‘s books are missing here. The northern landscape is present, but the ice looks thin.