‘Hunters’ Ripped By Auschwitz Memorial As ‘Dangerous Foolishness’
Jordan Peele‘s newest venture, Amazon’s Hunters, is finally out, though it hasn’t gotten the reception many thought it might. The show has been met with mixed reactions from critics and fans alike, but none have been as scathing as the comments issued this weekend by the Auschwitz Memorial. The account posted at least some of its problems with the show on its official Twitter account early Sunday morning.
“Auschwitz was full of horrible pain & suffering documented in the accounts of survivors. Inventing a fake game of human chess for @huntersonprime is not only dangerous foolishness & caricature. It also welcomes future deniers. We honor the victims by preserving factual accuracy.”
The situation the memorial was talking about was early in the first episode of Hunters and depicted the Nazis forcing Jewish prisoners to play a kind of human chess game where they had to kill each other if a move took them off the board. While that sort of thing isn’t said to have happened in real life, the program has never claimed to be historically accurate.
The Auschwitz Memorial seems to understand that the show, led by famed actor Al Pacino, is supposed to be a work of fiction, but it thinks this kind of fiction is something that can do damage, especially from those who are already claiming the holocaust never happened.
The Auschwitz Memorial then interacted with a couple of Twitter users trying to explain just why they were bothered by the way the show was put together. One Twitter user took the opportunity to ask whether or not they ever consulted on television and movie projects. The memorial responded to the tweet by saying the organization is always willing to help with that sort of thing, as long as they are asked — the implication being of course that the organization was not asked to consult on Hunters.
One user also claimed the memorial needed to take the show less seriously precisely because it was meant to be fictional. The official Twitter account tweeted back that even if the Amazon Prime series is fiction, it can still undercut the horrors of what happened.
“In other words, you say: ‘a movie can lie about reality as it is just a movie’. Here we absolutely disagree. This is disrespectful and dangerous.”
Hunters, which is set in a fictional 1977, shows a team of Nazi hunters who find numerous ways to take down those that are hiding in America. The show is currently getting just a 56 rating on Metacritic.
