Everything That Made Me Love Alejandro Amenábar's AMC+ Series, 'La Fortuna'

There are some series or movies you know you’re going to love from the trailer alone. I’m not talking about trailers that are chef-kiss great or the ones that get you hyped up, I’m talking about the direct opposite of the “thanks I hate it,” the kind that suckers you in and has you sinking so much cost that you put all your pleasure receptors on blast because you want to enjoy every single frame of that movie or series, but also you need to shut your brain’s ingrained, French-style methodical questioning of everything. Serious, good-faith questioning, not CinemaSins-style nitpicking.

Well, that happened when I watched the trailers for Alejandro Amenabar’s La Fortuna, all episodes currently streaming on AMC+ or Prime, if you’re in Canada:

I knew I had to love this series. There’s a reflex reaction that happens to people in non-English speaking countries whenever they see a production in their language that looks … on a Hollywood scale. An automated note to self to show up for it because we so rarely see stuff like that in our language. This is more poignant in the Spanish-speaking sphere, whether in Spain proper or in the Americas. That’s 90% of the reason why La Casa de Papel/Money Heist blew sky-high; 450 million underserved people who want to see stuff in their language, who want to see spectacle in their language, not just overlit telenovelas. Even if it’s Spain-centric. And no, we don’t mind if it’s loaded with clichés.

La Fortuna is the first series written and directed by Alejandro Amenábar (which has become a new rite of passage for auteur directors). Based on the graphic novel The Treasure of the Black Swann, by cartoonist Paco Roca and former diplomat Guillermo Corral, it tells a fictionalized version of the legal and diplomatic clash between the Spanish government and a US-based company for the treasure of a Spanish frigate sunk in 1804 (by the Brits, of course). A proper pirate’s loot, worth $500 million dollars in gold and silver doubloons, laying a few miles off the Portuguese coast, shallow enough to retrieve and far enough from the purview of that diplomatic quagmire that is the sea between Gibraltar and Algeciras.

For a first-timer, boy did Amenábar deliver. Because La Fortuna is an adventure story, a heartfelt tribute to the genre, and one he clearly always wanted to direct.

To clarify, in terms of percentage of runtime, this is actually a courtroom drama, but Amenábar frames it as an Adventure. What do I mean by that? Well, since the courtroom part takes place in the USA, I’ll define “adventure” on common instead of coded law. To quote Justice Potter Stewart: I know it when I see it.

Amenábar makes an earnest tribute of the adventure genre in what could’ve been another Sorkinian fable, infusing the spirit and imagery of the genre into a story that is light on action or set-pieces, whose stakes aren’t life or death. Instead, he takes tropes and the outrageous (the protagonist’s surname is Ventura and the antagonist’s is Wild for God’s sake!), the piece of classic adventure stories (travels, lost treasures, vaults, ships, underwater exploration, corruption, characters with a code), and uses it as motifs to celebrate all the things we have devalued: Civil servants, culture for culture’s sake, defining nationhood with something more than grievances, the virtue of unearthing history without disturbing the memory of people long gone. So, proper archeology instead of looting graves.

The story begins as Frank Wild (played by Internet’s boyfriend Stanley Tucci) discovers the remains of the Spanish frigate La Fortuna. An explorer and CEO of a deep-ocean research company, he still lives by his childhood fantasies of discovering that one lost treasure. But for Wild, the joy is found in the treasure, not in the discovery itself, so he vacuums the ocean floor to retrieve half a million coins and smuggles them into the United States.

The main storyline centers on two civil servants working for the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the classic duo of opposites that team up for something bigger than themselves. On one side, we have headstrong Lucía Vallarta (Ana Polvorosa, who 55% of you will fall in love with), a researcher that has kept track of Wild’s looting for years, to no avail, by a Spanish government that prefers to turn a blind eye. On the other side, Álex Ventura (Álvaro Mel, who the other 45% of you will fall in love with), an ambitious and very young diplomat with the soul of a 50-year-old, working both as the audience surrogate and a character of his own, sometimes cunning, sometimes awkward and wide-eyed. They are helped by American lawyer Jonas Pierce (Clarke Peters, also a bae), who has a history with Frank Wild. The story goes back and forth between Madrid, Washington D.C., and Atlanta, digging into the values of opposing Empires: The USA, one that snoozes at any notion of culture that doesn’t involve bullets (“they don’t even have a Secretary of Culture,” the Spanish Minister says to Álex); and Spain, one that is dead and buried but left behind an incalculable cultural heritage (“Culture is our oil”, in the words of the same character)).

Amenábar succeeds because he just takes the tropes of the adventure genre at face value and puts trust behind them. (Minor and Major Spoilers henceforth) Sometimes it doesn’t succeed, for example, in establishing a shared trauma between Pierce and Wild, involving the death of the former’s brother. Sometimes the results are mixed but come to a satisfying end, such as the complicated relationship between Wild and his daughter or the subplot involving the meddling of intelligence agencies and bigger geopolitical pictures. And sometimes it succeeds, like the romantic relationship between Lucía and Álex, supported by the chemistry between Mel and Polvorosa. Their energy differential is relatively commonplace: Álex is a traditionalist, rich, well-connected, Catholic, fiercely patriotic and clearly a supporter of the Partido Popular. Lucía is progressive, stuck career-wise, Atheist, skeptical of patriotism and clearly a supporter of the PSOE or Unidas-Podemos. What brings them together, other than the fact that they are both beautiful (Spanish-beautiful that is) is their passion for making their mundane line of work a quest. Like any good adventurer, retrieving the stolen treasure is just an excuse. Amenábar made an interesting call in having the characters reflect the actor’s age difference: Álex is fresh out of the Uni and full of energy. Lucía is ten years older, one of the millions of embattled Spanish Millennials, lucky in that at least she has a job, but one where she has to face an unending maze of soft corruption and chicanery.

Beyond having a good handle of tropes and clichés Amenábar also delivered in Spectacle, which alone would make this series worth its six hours runtime. Stunning spectacle, set to a rousing score by Roque Baños. Amenábar has an eye for enriching common scenarios, such as three people talking in a diner. He focuses his palette in bright reds, greens, and blues, in a way that falls right in the middle of natural and heightened reality. His camera movements are simple and subtle, such as pans of under 180 degrees, short oners, and intimate close ups, that let us take in the mise en scéne just enough without going the full Sam Levinson. It looks massive and gorgeous, even though its budget is probably a quarter of the Uncharted movie, which looks like ass and had neither a good script nor a pitch-perfect casting.

Allow me to put that movie on the spot. The producers behind that adaptation can count themselves lucky that AMC is dropping it on streaming without much fanfare because Amenábar put on a masterclass of spectacle. Even the CGI of the sea battle looks beautiful.

Ultimately, Amenábar succeeds in making this a meta-exercise on its theme of securing cultural heritage because the series is a celebration of Spain’s civil service and Cultural sector, beaten and scapegoated by a decade of crisis, austerity, and conservative governments. Amenábar gave them the sheen of classic adventure heroes and has them starring in their own epic. That’s more than enough to confirm that I did well in preemptively falling in love with La Fortuna.

All that being said, there is one glaring, huge omission in the series. One that I can’t ignore. A blindspot that I’m not sure if it’s deliberate, or because Amenábar and his team didn’t dare to touch it. I still think you should watch it. I still think Amenábar succeeded. But you cannot have a conversation about Spain’s cultural heritage without mentioning the obvious: Who funded it.

Because that wasn’t Spain’s gold.