SPOILERS! (You have been warned.)
*
*
*
Just finished the whole thing. It is absolutely worth seeing for the acting: although Andrew Scott is technically too old to play Ripley (they make Ripley and Dickie to be in their thirties instead of their twenties, which doesn't make a great deal of sense plot-wise), he is so terrific that he makes it work. Much of the series involves watching him do things wordlessly to cover his tracks, and it's hard to imagine any actor under the age of 30 able to do what he does in this.
I wound up being won over by Dakota fanning because she is so much closer in the end to Highsmith's vision of Marge than Gwyneth Paltrow was is the 1999 movie. This Marge is not from a wealthy background, and Fanning is not afraid to make her obnoxious and unlikable in the end.
The cinematography is absolutely spectacular--some of the best I've ever seen on television, and probably even better than "Shogun" which is running right now on F/X. It's like watching a gorgeous 1950s Italian movie by Visconti.
The direction is very clever, especially the use of the great Maine coon cat at the Rome apartment building. I've never seen a cat used to better effect in a film or TV show. It's like a Greek chorus--watching everything and seeing all of Ripley's schemes both where they work and fall apart.
The demerits:
Eliot Sumner just doesn't work as a cis-male character. They are distracting because they are so out of place. (As Freddie, Sumner wears fancy rich-boy Ferragamos and other fancy-boy clothes, but has a distracting long haircut that just doesn't read as period but reads instead as 2020s enbie.) When they get killed and their body has to be dragged out of the apartment and abandoned outside of Rome, you're always so aware of the oddness of the casting that dragging the corpse around begins to seem silly--it felt a bit like "Weekend at Bernie's."
The series could have been five or six episodes easily instead of eight, and the penultimate episode involves a cat-and-mouse game between Ripley and the inspector that involves dull long interviews that just go on too long, draining the scenes of their possible suspense (although the actor who plays the Italian inspector is terrific).
One of the big details of the original novel's denouement that involves Mr. Greenleaf making over his will to Tom never seemed believable in the original novel or the 1999 film, and so is wisely skipped here. But there's a new detail in this version to explain Tom's wealth at the end that doesn't make much sense either, involving a Picasso Dickie owns that Marge inexplicably never asks about after she believes Dickie is dead. (She cares about the fates of his ring and his boat, but for some reason not the Picasso.)