This is definitely one of those films that make you wonder how it got green lit.
Response rates for Julia Garner is off the charts with focus groups. She is marketable to middle aged suburban college educated women in their prime earning years. And also appeals to a large cross section of the demographic pull of something like Taylor Sheridan's Yellowstone audience. She even has a shade of what is affectionally known as "Pick Me" girl energy.
Garner is incredibly bankable for her age. She also has the quiet but forceful support of AIPAC behind her. She turns down a lot of offers, so that bodes well for the perceived quality of the script here. But we have to wait and see. I am cautiously optimistic. Garner by herself is enough to get some projects financed and green lighted.
As for the SFX on the "wolf", I'll wait and see. You can do a lot with set lighting, editing and clean up in post. In the middle of the 4th season of Ron Moore's Battlestar, they got a guest director, John Dahl, who was normally a film director used to stretching a very small budget. Back then, BSG suffered from a relatively small budget, major limitations on their sets, SFX was way more expensive and time consuming back then, but Dahl ( he did the episode called The Oath) basically showed the full potential of the kind of pacing, scope and scale possible within those limitations. His episode looks like an entirely different show at times compared to most other entries in the series. You can give the same resource base and set up to different people, and sometimes get wildly different results.
Within Ozark, sometimes there was great writing and sometimes there was middling writing. Many times, the cast were asked to do some heavy lifting and maximize some poor scripts. Garner got some rough writing IMHO during the middle of the show's run. There were time, along with Laura Linney, where she dragged that entire show on her back upwards. She's very impressive. I think it's a little more easy to see once you look at the Ozark scripts in the written form, then see how Garner converted it into some pretty compelling scenes. I'm more prone to give her the benefit of the doubt here.
