The Sentinels: radium, romance & rampaging Retro-Futurism (TV series).
If you thought you knew the First World War—mud, mustard gas, and moustaches bristling like bayonets—then Canal+’s new French science fiction series The Sentinels would like a word. Or rather, an explosion. Based on Xavier Dorison and Enrique Breccia’s graphic novel series Les Sentinelles, this eight-part adaptation finally lets French television get its diesel-soaked, radium-powered steampunk moment in the trenches.
The story begins with Gabriel Ferraud (Louis Peres), a French soldier so badly mangled by early battle that he’s prime recruitment fodder for a top-secret government experiment. Enter a serum that grants him impossible strength, speed, and resilience. Cue his induction into The Sentinels—an elite cadre of fellow augmented soldiers whose battlefield mayhem looks set to put the “total” in “total war.” Think Captain America by way of Verdun, but moodier, grittier, and with considerably more Gauloises smoke curling in the background.
The series promises more than just bullet-proof blokes smashing through German lines. There’s espionage skulduggery, a love story wrapped in tragedy (Gabriel’s wife, played by Olivia Ross, believes him dead but keeps searching anyway), and the Parisian setting itself—a city caught between romance and rubble, espionage and experimental science. Co-producer Delphine Clot teases that the directors Thierry Poiraud (Zone Blanche) and Édouard Salier (Mortel) have gone for something “both realistic and magical.” One imagines trench mud glistening with an unnatural glow, or zeppelins framed like cathedral spires against radioactive sunsets.
If the comic is anything to go by, things could veer into even stranger territory. The original Les Sentinelles gave us Taillefer, a literal man-machine powered by a radium battery (safety be damned). Whether the series goes full “cyborg in the Somme” remains to be seen, but judging from the trailer’s bursts of stylised violence, we’re at least in for a Franco-futurist riff on the super-soldier myth.
What sets The Sentinels apart from the usual Marvel-adjacent fare is its unapologetic Frenchness. This isn’t glossy Americana—this is World War I re-imagined through French eyes, French landscapes, and French melancholy. Even the tagline teased by the producers—“We don’t know everything about the First World War”—has the whiff of Gaulois philosophising. At SFcrowsnest magazine, we love this sort of thing: genre-bending, historically askew, and with just enough madness to make you believe radium batteries could change the tide of war.
Presented at the La Rochelle Fiction Festival in the “Event Fiction” slot and due to premiere on Canal+ in September 2025, The Sentinels already has scripts for season two in the works. Which means, if the trench warfare of season one doesn’t kill off our plucky augmented heroes, the French TV industry certainly won’t let them rest in peace.
Light your lanterns, lace your boots, and prepare to march: the war to end all wars is about to get very, very weird.
