Set in 1977, the television series Hunters depicts a Holocaust survivor (played by Al Pacino) who leads a gang of vigilantes in their quest to stop a plot by former Nazi officials to establish a Fourth Reich in the U.S. Hunters has already attracted much criticism for its saturation with comic-book and B-movie clichés, its myriad inaccuracies, and Pacino’s scenery-chewing. To A.E. Smith, “seeing post-Holocaust family trauma reduced to a series of superhero tropes, listening to bad Yiddish accents and mangled Jewish phrases, . . . and watching a seemingly endless parade of leering Nazis straight from central casting,” can be cringe-inducing. And there are more substantive problems as well:
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum roundly criticized Amazon for the show’s depiction of a twisted game of human chess, in which inmates/chess pieces are shot when they are taken, their bodies stacked up to one side of the playing field-sized board. . . . A sadistic chess game can stand in for an array of horrors, and that was probably the intent of the episode in the show, but surely actual historical events were more dreadful than anything dreamed up in the show’s writing room. The fantasized sadism of this and other scenes does not play well.
Nonetheless, writes Smith, the show also has its strengths:
The whole idea of a cabal of unreconstructed Nazis secretly plotting a violent coup in 1970s America seems—and is—ridiculous. But, in explaining the origins of this fictional conspiracy, Hunters forces us to consider another historical truth that is largely forgotten. After the war, America scooped up [the aerospace engineer] Wernher von Braun and 1,600 other Nazi scientists and engineers, expunging their wartime records and parachuting them into positions of influence in the American scientific establishment, particularly NASA.
Despite Hunters’s revenge fantasies, they all died, peacefully, in bed. . . .
The real problem, the show seems to be suggesting, is not conspiracies of old-time Nazis but the zombie quality of the ideology and its ability to renew itself in every generation. By far, the most chilling character in the entire show is Travis Leich, a young American convert to the Nazi cause. Travis is soft-spoken, well-groomed, articulate, and a stone-cold psycho killer. . . . [I]n its vernacular exploration of the remarkable power of Nazi ideology, Hunters serves as a candy-colored comic-book meditation on our own times—and a warning.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/uncategorized/6823/the-best-revenge-a-qualified-case-for-hunters/