'One Hunded Years of Solitude' review: Adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel visually dazzling, but falls flat

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Newlyweds José Arcadio Buendía (Marco González) and Úrsula Iguarán (Susana Morales) leave their village in search of a place where José can build a new utopian community called "Macondo." And so begins the Buendia family saga, which spans 100 years and ends in tragedy. The Buendia clan includes José and Úrsula's mysterious son, Colonel Aureliano Buendía (Claudio Cataño) who can see into the future. There's also Melquíades, the Gypsy (Gino Montesinos), who's writing the history of Macondo before it even happens (Melquíades has a habit of dying, then coming back to life.)

This Spanish-language 16-episode series (the first eight drop Wednesday) was brought to TV by Rodrigo García and Gonzalo García Barcha, the sons of Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, whose "100 Years" was published in 1967. (He died in 2014) This also marks the first time it has been adapted.

MY SAY Long before he wrote one of the world's most celebrated novels,Márquez worked as a film critic for a Bogota newspaper. As a practical matter, this meant that he knew exactly what could go wrong when novels were adapted for the screen. "I can’t think of any one film that improved on a good novel," he told the Paris Review in 1981, "but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels."

That — or perhaps 2007's critically dismissed movie adaptation of "Love in the Time of Cholera" — led him to determine that "100 Years" should never be turned into a movie. But what about TV? What about streaming TV?

Márquez lived just long enough to see what Netflix could potentially do, while his sons obviously decided that should be good enough for "100 Years": The dialogue in Spanish, filmed in Colombia, huge cast, and enough episodes to capture every single word, plot and character.

This sumptuous sprawl is certainly dedicated to the notion that more is more (is more). Nothing needs to be left to the imagination either because nothing has to be. You want to see Aureliano Buendía levitate? You will. You wonder how his half-sister Rebecca's dead parents — in the book just a pile of bones in a gunny sack — behave? You can now. (It's morbidly funny, by the way.)

Then there are those big ideas. The novel's fatalistic sweep of history is rendered as some sort of Macondo magical mystery tour through time, which goes forward, then reverses, before ending up in the place where it was all fated (or prophesied) to start from. This was about the tragedy of Latin American history, into which were nested other ideas, about the cyclic nature of time, human consciousness, the perversion of colonialism, and so on. Meanwhile, there are those many "magical realism" touches — the fantastical little things that made Macondo and the Buendía family not quite real yet intensely real.

Colombian-born director Alex García López (most recently Disney's "The Acolyte") obviously decided the best approach here was the direct one. With the exception of the apocalyptic opening sequence, this "100 Years" is told sequentially, as a straight line through the years. This means it makes perfect sense until briefly derailed by magic and illusion. López almost treats these detours as an inconvenience, or worse, an embarrassment. In any event, they come and just as quickly go without explanation or context.

This "100" is indeed dazzling to look at and to listen to (in English, this "100 Years" would be — well — strange) while the cast is excellent. But what's missing is what possibly matters even more — those ideas, that magic. Without them, this is just another intelligent TV series with a lot of money on the screen. Márquez was right. His masterpiece is impossible to adapt.

BOTTOM LINE Sumptuous but flat.