A Filmmaker's Review: "The Last Czars" (2019, Netflix)

I kind of don't want to admit that I watched this entire show in the space of a few days but here we are. Anyways, this show was definitely the right kind of show for me. A strange blend between a documentary starring some of the greats of Russian Historical Studies and then we have a dramatisation of it for the other half which dominates the show. The one thing I loved about this series is it takes the time to explain why things are happening the way they are and they are all set against a backdrop of the doctor coming to check if the stranger in the hospital is actually Anastasia or is just a woman with a severe mental disorder.

The show starts off with the death of the former Czar and moves on to the reign of the final Czar, Nicholas II. We go through the wedding, the births of each child and then the birth of the son and the arrival of the Mad Monk. It really does take its time explaining each major section of the situation and why certain outcomes take place. Nicholas II's rule is nothing but a shambles in reality but it isn't entirely his own fault, there seems to be some underlying problems that this show investigates for any of us who have studied this era of history at school, it may come as a shock that he wasn't actually a bad person - he was a good person who made bad choices.

When the influence over the court begins to grow and the Mad Monk gets more and more power, we can definitely see how the Czar's court starts to disintegrate into literally nothing and this is the first bad choice he makes. After this, we have the war with Japan, then the first world war and then the Russian Revolution, all of which are a series of bad choices and bad outcomes from one to another to another until 1918.

One of the speakers in the show is Simon Sebag Montefiore, the author of the seminal book "The Romanovs" (which I personally remember everyone being obsessed with) and its all about this luxuriant rule and the way in which the Romanovs amassed so much power over the course of 300 years or so. Not only that, but it is also about how they held on to their power, ultimately though, it was lost through influence and bad decisions. Each section that Montefiore comments on, he gives a great amount of reason to why Nicholas II was making these choices, who was actually behind them and why he was going against the will of most of the other people in the room.

When the Russian Revolution became underway, there was so much turbulence in the show it would be very difficult not to watch the last few episodes back to back because they are so interesting. Once the wars are being abandoned and the revolution breaks out, there is a certain amount of chaos that makes havoc in the lives of the royal family. They are moved somewhere safer and eventually, as we all know, they are executed by gunshots. This signalled the end of a 300 year dynasty.

The show does a great job of showing us the state of Russia at the time when Nicholas II and his family are being moved for their own safety and after they leave the palace, some kind of civil war breaks out on the streets of Russia with many people following the new leader, Lenin. This was the chaos of the Bolshevik Revolution and the show does a great deal of service by going through the final two years of the lives of the royal family very slowly. This is because we need to understand how each and every thing is happening in order to see why the Czar and his family were executed there and then. It was most obviously because the civil war meant that royalists knew where the royal family were and were looking to break them out and restore them to power.

This show makes for great entertainment but you also learn a lot from it, especially if you were taught about this time period at school. I feel like this time period is not only highly underrated but there is not much known about the slight aftermath that happens when the family die. In this show, it does cover how the bones were deliberately lost and how they came to be found again. It is an amazing show and I highly recommend it to anyone, even if you're not into historical documentaries - I think this may surprise you.