Editing The Witcher (section)

===The Hexer===
First of all, while in Poland it is simply titled "Wiedźmin", the international release was under "Hexer", as the "Witcher" term wasn't coined yet (and Sapkowski himself preferred "Hexer"). This ended up being a good thing, since you can easily tell it apart from the Netflix one, which is under "The Witcher" title.

It's a mixed bag: some things are great, other are terrible and some are just incredibly corny. Being a big budget (of course for Polish standards - so you are still in a B-movie territory) production, it at least secured good location shots and quite an impressive cast of Polish A-listers and hired an acclaimed music composer to deliver epic-tier soundtrack, so at least they approach the material serious enough. In the same time, it uses god-awful rubber puppets and early, turn-of-the-millenium CGI, which looked bad even when the thing was brand new, while sets range wildly from great location shots to the basement under the film studio.

But the most important aspect is the level of adaptation. During pre-production, Sapkowski suddenly went 180 degrees and from big supporter became the most vocal enemy of the series. Rumor has it he tried to renegotiate his contract (something he's kind of infamous for), and the studio executives just laugh in his face. Since not all legal agreements were signed with him prior, this allowed him to walk out of production and not provide full copyright to his short stories. As a result, the planned 13 episodes, adopting each of the Witcher short stories, ended up with barely half the needed material secured. As a result, the script writer had to get rather... creative, to fill up the contracted length of the show. This in turn lead to a whole lot of things created specifically for the series and that had nothing to do with the source material. And as you can guess, those things were viciously picked apart by the fandom. Then the costuming and prop departments added their own, treating it as just a throw-away production and half-assing their effort.

In the end, 13 hour-long episodes have been made, tracking more or less the plot of stories from "The Last Wish" and "Sword of Destiny" along with semi-canon and outright made-up elements of Geralt's backstory. The rule of thumb being that if the episode is original content, it's shit, and if it's following a short story, then it's genuinely good.

To wit, the good, the bad and the ugly:
* Music is awesome. If you are the kind of fag that plays background music for your games, you have an hour of combat music ready to steal.
* Despite being infamous in Poland for being a very weak adaptation, it is significantly more faithful to the stories than Netflix ever bothered to.
* Michał Żebrowski, who played Geralt, became so synonymous with the character, he coloured video game adaptations, which are closer to his performance than who Geralt is in the books.
* The original content is pure skub for the most part, and the changes in the "canon" are often pointless, needessly complicating things rather than making them easier to film.
* The performances are all over the place, depending from actor to actor. Some of them clearly cared, others did not, and some were fresh out of acting school. This makes certain scenes where all three groups perform at once pure comedy gold.
* Since it was made by Poles for Polish market, nobody had any issues with nudity.
* Do you like katanas? Because witchers carry one to fight with non-monsters. And they use aikido, too.
* The special effects aged like milk. A 20 yo milk. Either roll with it, or at least get drunk before watching.
* There is no official international release of the series. There is however bunch of bootlegs floating around the net, accessible with English, German, Swedish and Russian subtitles.

Oh, and one more thing - there is a "film". It's not an actual movie, but a crudely cobbled together 120 minutes of nonsense made out of the material of the TV series. It is infamously terrible and even if you know the source material, you will be hard pressed to grasp the plot of it. The fact majority of people involved in making the series asked for their names to be removed from the credits of this shitpile should tell you more than enough. The legacy of this monstrosity is so strong, just mentioning "Hexer" to any adult Pole will instantly trigger PTSD and a 2d6 minutes long rant on how awful the ''film'' was, completely missing the memo you want to dicuss the series.