Fifty years ago, Klaatu landed his saucer on a baseball diamond in Washington DC, was surrounded by Army tanks and soldiers. The saucer opens, a ramp extends, out he walks holding a device in his hand and what happens? A soldier fires at him, shooting the device out of his hand and destroying it.
Have we come any farther than this in the treatment of superior race, highly advanced aliens after fifty years of film making? Not really.. not at all. Technologically, we have CGI spaceships instead of painted plywood.
"Taken" had its moments of brilliance, but this 20 hours of over-padded nonsense, loaded down with so many commercials by the SciFi Network as it was (If I NEVER see one of those IBM commercials again, it'll be too soon).. seemed to be leading up to something, to some final conclusion of utter joy and brilliance, and it just simply didn't get there. The ending, which I will not spoil, was an enormous letdown..
I won't try to detail the plot, which spans fifty years, if you're reading this you've probably read a bajillion other comments and know what it's all about anyway, but I will hit two things that really stuck out in my mind..
a) Little Dakota Fanning, as Ally, is an absolutely AMAZING actress, showing a depth of range and ability that is nothing short of astounding. I can't imagine how good she will be, or at least potentially could be, as she gets older.. I wish her the best of luck. She was easily the best actor in this marathon..
b) Matt Frewer, as a brilliant, wise-cracking alien scientist and researcher caused his own demise in on of the shows final hours, with one of the most absurd, unconvincing, hackneyed bits of contrived stupidity imaginable.. in this age of cell phones, he turns his back on "Mary Crawford" within earshot of her while she's taking a shower, just feet away from him in a hotel room, and picks up the room phone to make a call to expose her evil intent. For crying out loud, he saw her have her own father killed, showing absolutely no remorse.. why in the world wouldn't he have gone outside the room, outside the hotel, and made that call with a cell phone? Dooming himself the way he did was incredibly cheap writing, and while it was unexpected, it was also totally illogical for his character to have sacrificed himself so easily..
This twenty hour snooze-a-thon could've been distilled down to two or three two hour segments, and not lost anything at all, and been better for the shortening in every way. As it was, I got the feeling the producers made it 20 hours long (minus endless commercials) just to prove they could do it.
It didn't give us anything new at all. The ending was a gross letdown.
While they're not science fiction, if you ever want to see two absolutely brilliantly written and acted television mini-series, watch "Shogun" and "Roots." Those are commercial television at its finest.
Harv
Have we come any farther than this in the treatment of superior race, highly advanced aliens after fifty years of film making? Not really.. not at all. Technologically, we have CGI spaceships instead of painted plywood.
"Taken" had its moments of brilliance, but this 20 hours of over-padded nonsense, loaded down with so many commercials by the SciFi Network as it was (If I NEVER see one of those IBM commercials again, it'll be too soon).. seemed to be leading up to something, to some final conclusion of utter joy and brilliance, and it just simply didn't get there. The ending, which I will not spoil, was an enormous letdown..
I won't try to detail the plot, which spans fifty years, if you're reading this you've probably read a bajillion other comments and know what it's all about anyway, but I will hit two things that really stuck out in my mind..
a) Little Dakota Fanning, as Ally, is an absolutely AMAZING actress, showing a depth of range and ability that is nothing short of astounding. I can't imagine how good she will be, or at least potentially could be, as she gets older.. I wish her the best of luck. She was easily the best actor in this marathon..
b) Matt Frewer, as a brilliant, wise-cracking alien scientist and researcher caused his own demise in on of the shows final hours, with one of the most absurd, unconvincing, hackneyed bits of contrived stupidity imaginable.. in this age of cell phones, he turns his back on "Mary Crawford" within earshot of her while she's taking a shower, just feet away from him in a hotel room, and picks up the room phone to make a call to expose her evil intent. For crying out loud, he saw her have her own father killed, showing absolutely no remorse.. why in the world wouldn't he have gone outside the room, outside the hotel, and made that call with a cell phone? Dooming himself the way he did was incredibly cheap writing, and while it was unexpected, it was also totally illogical for his character to have sacrificed himself so easily..
This twenty hour snooze-a-thon could've been distilled down to two or three two hour segments, and not lost anything at all, and been better for the shortening in every way. As it was, I got the feeling the producers made it 20 hours long (minus endless commercials) just to prove they could do it.
It didn't give us anything new at all. The ending was a gross letdown.
While they're not science fiction, if you ever want to see two absolutely brilliantly written and acted television mini-series, watch "Shogun" and "Roots." Those are commercial television at its finest.
Harv
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