Downtone Abbey (2019)

I had been interested in watching the Downton Abbey TV show for some time and the coming of the Downton Abbey movie gave me an excuse to finally see it. I watched the series over the summer and really enjoyed it, it's got a neat setting, some great characters you come to really care for and is generally well written. My two big complaints about the series is a writerly over reliance on convenient inheritances, and the Crawley's seem unrealistically tolerant people for early 20th Century British aristocracy, However those are minor quibbles, I get why people love this show because I loved it to. Despite being globally popular the series pulled its own plug with season 6 and gave it's self a really nice send off. The ending was so good in fact that there didn't really seem to be a point to a movie, however much as Toy Story 4 is to Toy Story 3, here we've already got our ending and this is just the epilogue, and turns out that is nice to have as well with extra little flourishes put on some long standing plots and character arcs.

I read one review say that nothing happens in the Downton Abbey movie and that's why it's great, which I think for the most part is true, the stakes are limited and its just fun to see these characters again. However to walk around a major spoiler here there is something that happens in the Downton Abbey movie which if this had happened in any other movie it's what the whole film would have been about, while here its a third string plot, you'll know it when you see it. I can't help but wonder what seeing this movie would be like if you'd never seen the series, it would probably seem even less consequential then it already does. However if you're a fan of the series you'll probably get a lot out of the Downton Abbey movie, it's a manifestation of nostalgia for a recent series about nostalgia. One the surface this is just a *** but adjusted for emotional inflation it gets ***1/2.