Nicolas Winding Refn getting lost: Too Old to Die Young

Let me put out there first that Nicolas Winding Refn is one of my favourite directors. Of course I love Drive and Bronson, but The Neon Demon even ranks among my favourite films. So sooner or later, I had to watch Too Old To Die Young.
This is truly made for die-hard NWR fans. But even as a huge fan, I have to admit that this doesn't even come close to what he made before. The reason for that is that Refn doesn't really have a clue what he's telling here. What made his other films so great is his crystal-clear vision of the end products. That simply doesn't exist here.
I watched literally all interviews which exist of Refn talking about his „13-hours-movie“ and he describes the screenwriting process in a very detailled way. After every evening of shooting, he would sit down and continue writing the unfinished screenplay. When he started shooting the series, he had no clue how it was supposed to end. You can feel that in literally every single scene. Refn repeats himself several times, there is no suspense arc, no coherent story which holds the whole thing together. Maybe that was intended to be so. But unfortunately, I had throughout the series several times the feeling that what Refn shoots always depends on his mood on the day of shooting. I could literally see him sitting there with Ed Brubaker, thinking out loud: „What could we do next? What could we shoot tomorrow? Oh yeah, why don't we make Jesus like anal sex and wearing make-up? We haven't had that in the 8 episodes before. So great, let's do that tomorrow.“. That results in some episodes having absolutely no meaning or purpose, and in a last episode which is completely unneccessary and only 30 minutes long. It couldn't be more obvious that Refn was done after the ninth episode, but he promised Amazon ten, so he had to come up with something for another one.
Too Old To Die Young basically tells the story of how Refn settled in the States, fell in love with the whole Underground-LA-cop-criminatlity-gang-occultism-vibe, got the idea to make a television series about it and simply had fun making it, despite having no clue what exactly he wants it to be. Each scene screams that. Refn was just brainstorming and filming literally everything which came to his mind and what was fun for him. Every morning, as he explains in countless interviews, he scrolls through YouTube and watches what is trending, what's new etc. So when he watches something about Trump-loving cops, he decides to make a scene the next day where the whole police office shouts „fascism“ and „fake news“. When he watches something about the collapse of the American society, he randomly shoots a scene in which someone's talking about how rotten the society is. And so on, and so on. Maybe it wasn't exactly like that, but that's at least how it feels. Whatever trends were on his mind, he decided to include them in his project, without really developping something out of it. He doesn't criticize anything, he doesn't dig deeper into the topics, he just scratches the surface. He just reproduces what he's seen on YouTube and having fun shooting it.
Watching Nicolas Winding Refn having fun isn't bad though: as the director truly understands his craft, every single scene for itself is perfection. The mood, the lighting, the cinematography and the editing are all on point. There's nothing you could criticize about the technical filmmaking here. Refn maybe even topped himself when it comes to style and aesthetics. And that the scenes are so slow isn't something bad – on the contrary: the series' rhythm is extremely slow, yes, but it has the interesting effect that you get used to it so quickly that you don't even feel how quickly the time passes. Sometimes you just watch the camera show some landscapes or bodies for 5 minutes. Nothing happens, no action, no dialogue. Those scenes mostly feel like a minute, and only if you check, you find out that you watched basically nothing for 5 minutes without noticing. That's why the very long episodes (often 1.5 hours) with very little action don't feel long at all. Refn's slow pace puts you in some kind of meditative state. So yeah, I can't say I didn't enjoy watching all this. I had lots of fun with Too Old To Die Young.
And still, this is a series without any substance. I am always a fan of „Style over Substance“, but a bit too often, Too Old To Die Young is only „Nonsense over Substance“. And after watching all of these interviews of Refn, I think that he knows that this is by far not his masterpiece. That's why he showed at Cannes not the first episodes, but episodes 4 & 5. He argued that „that's how most consumers watch today. They skip forward and backward, from episode to episode, they don't watch anymore in chronological order“. He says that he wanted to show the series in the same way how children nowadays watch YouTube. Hopefully I don't have to explain why this is an incredibly silly argumentation. Yes, people skip forward when it's boring (and I can't deny I did that a few times in this series too, especially in the Jesus-storyline), but still, the majority watches in a chronological order. Refn simply wanted to find an excuse for showing episodes 4 & 5 which sounds somehow professional. But I am sure that the real reason he showed these two is that he knows that they're the best ones. And that the rest of his „brainstorm-experiment“ is simply not that good and way too long.
As I still had fun watching it and enjoyed the visuals, I would like to forgive Refn for Too Old To Die Young in his otherwise flawless filmography. But sadly, his next project is a TV series about a cop in LA: Maniac Cop. Exactly the same. I can't put into words what a shame that is. That simply shows that he wasn't really happy how this unscripted experiment turned out, but that he was still obsessed with this idea, so he decided to remake it just after he finished production on the first attempt. But honestly, I won't watch another Refn series on a LA cop. Especially not if I have to sit through 13 hours again.
Sadly, I have the impression that Refn already reached his artistic peak a few years ago, and that we shouldn't wait for him to produce another great film. Because I don't think that will happen in near future. This man is too caught up in watching YouTube every morning.