2023-11-23 16:18:48
series, which „When I am laid in earth“, the legendary lament from Henry Purcell’s opera “Dido and Aeneas”, serves as an acoustic foil, can’t actually be a bad series. Unfortunately, you already know when you first encounter this deadly sad, woeful swan song to love and life, which Jessye Norman made immortal at the latest, that the story on this film cannot possibly end well. Which is dramaturgically questionable and of course rather stupid in a story that is about nothing less than potentially saving the world.
More than a million readers know about the unpleasant ending Andreas Eschbachs The now almost legendary financial thriller “One Billion Dollars” itself, from which Max Wiedemann and Quirin Berg, the producers of “Dark” and “4 Blocks”, with the active help of screenwriters Florian Iwersen and Stefan Holtz, became Paramount+’s most expensive German series production have made.
The thousand-pager was published 22 years ago. He made the trained economist and late-career suspense writer famous in one fell swoop. Along with Frank Schätzing’s “The Swarm,” “One Billion Dollars” was celebrated as a kind of German declaration of independence from standard American thriller production.
The fact that it took almost a quarter of a century for Eschbach’s clandestine, dystopian economics lesson, this early swan song for the global economy, to make its way to the silver screen is more than surprising. And it didn’t necessarily do the six-part series, directed by Florian Baxmeyer and Isabel Braak and rather painstakingly updated, any good, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
One one, twelve zeros
John, as the series story begins, is a bicycle courier in Berlin. One that only appears in the book. He has a lot of fun cycling, breaks all records with his ultra-stylish bike, doesn’t complain about the wages, doesn’t have to wear a stupid uniform and lives where young people in their late twenties without completed vocational training in Berlin live their days: in a loft-like place , which no ordinary bicycle courier can afford. But we are also in a fairy tale here. This should not be forgotten in the following. It’s also difficult because John, because Philip Froissant plays him, looks like Sisi’s beautiful Emperor Franz Joseph in “The Empress”.
One day a hereditary investigator shows up at the door of beautiful John. Demands saliva sample and signature. A little later, after a ride in a black limousine under a blue sky, John finds himself in a villa in the mountains behind Florence that looks like it’s freshly dusted for the Italian version of an Inga Lindström tearjerker.
The aged godfather of the Vacchi, an ancient Florentine money storage and multiplication institution, reveals to him that John’s actual name is Giovanni and that he can look forward to Giacomo Fontanelli’s inheritance. In other words, a fortune whose origins go back to the time before Henry Purcell and is currently worth a trillion dollars (one one, twelve zeros). John is therefore four times richer than Elon Musk.
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Giacomo gave the legacy an apocalyptic prophecy of biblical proportions and the task of giving “humanity back its lost future” despite its impending, self-made demise. John has the money, but he doesn’t have any of it because he’s on a mission. He has to save the world for a moment.
After he quickly gets over the rush of money with parties, Ferraris and coke – there isn’t that much time in a six-parter – John becomes the perfect projection screen for the Fontanelli Group, the new Jesus of the global stock market world. Someone who tries to prove, has to prove, how one can create good in an industry that always wants evil for every left-wing cliché thinker.
Wrong turned
Because the epicenter of John’s fate lies in Italy, Italians, even if they are played by Turks, speak heavy Italian accents and look gloomy, and Florence (Dan Brown!) is always good for a dark world conspiracy, “A Billion Dollar” is different of the possible financial world analysis degenerates relatively quickly into an aesthetically quite hybrid and also narratively half-baked joke.
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The world, according to the dangerous core of the six-part series, which should confirm the worldview of every right-wing populist lateral thinker, has not been ruled by politicians for decades, but by an Illuminati-like economic association, a state behind all states. By people for whom the common good is nothing and increasing power is everything.
“One Billion Dollar” seems to have aged poorly not only because of its thesis, but above all because since the release of Eschbach’s truly groundbreaking first successful German business thriller, there have been a surprising number of German stock market dramas available for streaming that have set standards beyond which “One Billion Dollar” falls behind. “Bad Banks,” for example, was aesthetically more consistent and analytically precise and “King of Stonks” was more satirically pointed and evil.
Doesn’t help against economic ignorance. Only against musical ones. Keep your money safe in your pillow is the message. And hears Purcell. I can only agree with the latter.
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