I will win at RISK! Oh, wait, you’ve already won.
Perhaps it’s a sign that I’ve watched too many movies, digested too many stories. Years and years ago, good friends of ours highly recommended Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011), and we recently finally took them up.
It was meh.
This is the story of the rehydration of the dry river bed of the Yemen, the population of it with salmon from Britain, and the personal drama surrounding the project. The latter ranges from incredulity at the scope and even arrogance of the project, financed by a rich Arabian sheik who’s a fly fishing fanatic, to the breakup of the chief expert’s marriage, and ranging onwards to the coordinator of the project, who, midway through, loses her military boyfriend in a firefight in Afghanistan.
And then comes the Yemen locals who, being who they are, can’t stand the thought of a river going through their homeland. They’re going to do something about this sheik and his dam, you know?
The various elements of an interesting story are present, the conflict, the setbacks, new strategies, personal anguish, and the sheik has some nice charisma going for him, but it just didn’t come together for us. Some of it was simply that, for the major characters, all the disasters were cleaned up and dispensed with. The minor characters, well, who cares? They were basically spear-carriers, window-dressing to the drama.
It all felt just not quite right. And maybe that’s because I’ve seen the form too many times, and this was not as well done as some. I can’t fault the technical aspects of the production, and the concept has a nice tinge of outrageousness to it. But, in the end, I felt like maybe another two drafts of the script, concentrating on throwing some actual tragedy at the major characters and spicing up the supporting characters, might have benefited this story greatly.
