Perhaps not, I'm just not really liking that they've pasted in a fairly standard on-the-run-from-the-bad-state-with-contraband thriller. They've tried too hard to make the characters likeable, which perversely makes them less likeable for being so unreal. Agreed on Rufus Sewell's character, though it's notable that for the one person they give some nastiness to reflect the world they live in, he has to be a high ranking SS officer. Even Juliana's casually racist in the book! Which to me just makes the world itself suffer and look like the CGI that it is. Contrast with Blade Runner, where you don't really care if you can see the cables lowering the spinner, it feels like a real place full of knobheads.
On the film Grasshopper, I agree that visually it works better, my problem is with the concept of it. There's nothing odd or otherworldly about a book with subversive ideas being shared underground, which is one reason the end of the novel is a bit of a mindfeck. With this, it's actual photographic evidence in the first episode of a parallel universe... just diminishes the whole effect to me.
