{"id":452023,"date":"2026-02-06T06:37:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-06T06:37:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/452023\/"},"modified":"2026-02-06T06:37:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-06T06:37:07","slug":"finding-harmony-a-kings-vision-review-theres-a-bizarre-moment-where-its-like-charles-has-taken-acid-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/452023\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding Harmony: A King\u2019s Vision review \u2013 there\u2019s a bizarre moment where it\u2019s like Charles has taken acid | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

We find ourselves at an interesting moment in the streaming wars; one where Amazon\u2019s programming policy has apparently shifted to simply giving a massive platform to authority. Last week saw the release of the Melania <\/a>Trump film (a grating vanity project it paid $75m for) and this week it\u2019s our turn, with the platform releasing the King Charles documentary Finding Harmony: A King\u2019s Vision.<\/p>\n

Why Jeff Bezos would want to curry favour with the most powerful people on the planet by paying to air uncritical profiles of them is anyone\u2019s guess. Either way, as a film, Finding Harmony is intensely frustrating to watch. It is ostensibly a relatively important climate crisis documentary, undone by its own innate sense of chippy entitlement. Perhaps a better title would have been King Charles: Needless to Say I Had the Last Laugh.<\/p>\n

Running to 90 minutes \u2013 but feeling much longer, like the sort of thing designed to run on a loop in the background of a conference \u2013 the core message of Finding Harmony is that the world is in trouble, but only because we didn\u2019t listen to the king. He is, we are told via Kate Winslet\u2019s awestruck narration, \u201ca man who has spent a lifetime building harmony\u201d, which might come as a surprise to anyone who has read Prince Harry\u2019s book.<\/p>\n

The fawning tone continues, with Charles telling us that he saw environmental collapse coming as long ago as the 60s, and interviewees pointing out that \u201cpeople dismissed him as crazy\u201d. We see him champion organic food, and headlines calling him a lunatic, before we\u2019re reminded that his once-fringe beliefs have now become fully mainstream.<\/p>\n

Awestruck \u2026 Kate Winslet narrates. Photograph: The King\u2019s Foundation & Courtney Louise Photography<\/p>\n

This is the key frustration. Because, ultimately, he is right. Even with all the undeniable scientific evidence at our disposal, it is still impossible to make people take the climate crisis seriously. Had we all possessed the king\u2019s foresight four or five decades ago, there is every likelihood that the world would be in a better state than it is now.<\/p>\n

However, the film carries the thrumming sense that King Charles was out on a limb by himself, which does rather discount the influence of Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson and the founders of Earth Day. This is only exacerbated when the film tries to expand the other threads of the king\u2019s nebulous \u201charmony\u201d philosophy.<\/p>\n

These include the restoration of Dumfries House, which we\u2019re told has helped to train the local community in traditional pursuits (and neglects to mention that it was at the centre of a cash-for-honours scandal). We\u2019re also shown how the king has paved the way in the field of teaching prisoners to bee-keep, and told how he helped to rebuild Kabul by educating liberated locals about art.<\/p>\n

If the latter sounds familiar, it\u2019s because it formed part of Bitter Lake<\/a>, the Adam Curtis Afghanistan documentary, which had a clip of women reacting incredulously to an image of Duchamp\u2019s urinal. In fact, Finding Harmony often resembles one of Curtis\u2019s films, in the way that it tries to link a bunch of disparate claims with a churning array of stock footage.<\/p>\n

Among these claims: walking through forests is good because pine particles enter your blood; the housing crisis is down to people not wanting to live in ugly tower blocks; and the universe is filled with patterns that repeat throughout space and time in a demonstration of harmonious mathematics that affects our emotions and wellbeing. This last one, it has to be said, comes a little out of the blue, as if King Charles dropped a sneaky tab of acid then spent the afternoon staring at the back of his hand.<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is why the film ended up on Amazon. The BBC, you sense, would have pushed back on some of the more ostentatiously woo-woo elements. Plus, as a corporation so nervy about the climate emergency that even David Attenborough has to go elsewhere when he needs to drive a point home, it might have tried to undercut the king\u2019s environmental warnings with footage of Jordan Peterson calling it hooey. And that really wouldn\u2019t do, especially in a film that feels precision-engineered to underscore the king\u2019s legacy.<\/p>\n

Either way, it will be fascinating to see how this does on Amazon. Twenty years ago, a film with this level of access to a British monarch would have aired on a terrestrial channel, and people would have watched in their millions, if only for the fact that nothing else was on. Here it will find itself nestled in a submenu alongside MrBeast<\/a> and an Italian brainrot cartoon. Who knows if the king of England can compete with that any more.<\/p>\n

Finding Harmony: A King\u2019s Vision is on Prime Video now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We find ourselves at an interesting moment in the streaming wars; one where Amazon\u2019s programming policy has apparently…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":452024,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":{"0":"post-452023","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=452023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452023\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/452024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=452023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=452023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=452023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}