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Saturday, 25 June 2011 08:21

Falling Skies

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Maybe it's just me getting older and growing more curmudgeonly.  But as I watched the pilot ep for TNT's new series  "Falling Skies" I kept hearing and seeing the echoes of "V" (both versions) "War of the Worlds" (all versions) "Battlefield L.A."  "Battlestar Galactica" "Walking Dead" and a dozen other humans-on-the-run , post-apocalyptic invasion movies and teleplays.

Not that this was necessarily a bad thing.  But it's also not a good thing.

Aliens invade!  No news at 11:00 because we don't have anything resembling infrastructure anymore.  Groups of humans (300 to each group apparently) have to survive against long odds.  The aliens who have suddenly invaded and killed most of the armies of the world want us for: 1) food, 2) slaves, 3) sex/play toys 4) all of the above 5) none of the above.  Anything you pick is correct because after the first two hours of the show you don't know and speculation isn't given a lot of play here.  

Again, not necessarily a bad thing seeing that this will be a major reveal at some point.

I can categorize the pilot episode of "Falling Skies" in three basic ways:  there are some bad parts (hundreds of humans making camp fires in the open and the aliens just can't find anyone 2) okay parts (the interactions between the humans) and great parts (bad ass alien video game scenes!)

Noah Wylie is the lead actor in the series and the former "ER" doc has his work cut out for him.  He's well-liked by everyone except his commanding officer (Will Patton) whose only job seems to be to growl at Wylie and create problems for him.

As a former history teacher, Wylie's perspective is that the humans can cause so many problems that the aliens will just leave them alone - like other  insurgencies from the past.  Yeah, right.  They're gonna travel ten-thousand light years, bring all sorts of fighters and war craft to this planet, blow 90% of it up, and then suddenly give up and go home like we did in Vietnam or the Russians did in Afghanistan .  Big difference - those places couldn't be nuked from orbit to win the war, Braniac.  This is insanely weak rationale given the death of millions of humans at the hands of the invading aliens but perhaps it's the only way Wylie's character can justify getting up in the morning.  I just wish someone would have said something to him and had him respond that way: "Damnit, Jim, it's the only way I can get up in the morning since the aliens destroyed all the Starbucks!" (Problem with that is you just suspect that there's, in fact, a Starbucks somewhere on the mothership serving the equivalent of a skinny latte.)

Wylie has three sons, two of which are with him and one who has been kidnapped and fitted with a device that looks like an external, biological spine that enslaves humans to the will of the alien masters.  Of course, it doesn't seem to cause much pain despite that it's drilling into massive nerve clusters in your back - no, it just make you walk zombie-like and, of course, kills you if you take it off.  Otherwise, it's cool - just a benign little symbiote attached to your spinal column.

Of course, part of what Wylie's character wants to accomplish is to free his middle son from these aliens - a herculean task to be sure given that he's got little else than a AR-15 and a disapproving scowl. 

The aliens themselves - Skitters and Mechs - are both frightening and familiar.  The mechs (bi-pedal robots?  alien armor?  Roombas on 'roids?) are actually scarier to me than the skitters which are insectoid in nature and have six legs and a head/mouth I've seen in six dozen other alien shows - can't anyone come up with anything different than the farging "Predator" model? 

One scene where one of Wylie's sons hides from the Mechs, these earth pounding walking death dealers, actually had me paranoid and a bit on edge.  And there are some other scenes like that which will make you shudder. Unfortunately they are few and far between, and too many more scenes that will make you shudder for different and not so good reasons.  

Colin Cunningham, who plays the leader of a rogue gang that relishes killing aliens, is intriguing in his role even though they give him stupid lines like "you don't go for a head shot - you shoot the legs out first, then you go for a head shot."  Well, duh, Mr. Obvious - you go for anything that you can and if a creature has six big-ass legs then those would be targets, yes.  His character has potential even given some of the scene chewing moments he has to get through to establish him and his story movement going forward ("I think I'll take a break.  Being the leader of a post-apocalyptic gang has been exhausting.")

There's great eye candy here for both sides of the aisle.  Moon Bloodgood plays a  pediatrician turned battlefield doc and seems like the love interest for Wylie although there was no scene that gave you anything to really base that on.  Plenty of young blond freedom fighters (Jessy Schram, Sarah Carter, Seychelle Gabriel )and hunky doods (Drew Roy, Mpho Koaho)  -  although I was beginning to wonder why the hair dye wasn't fading on most of them given that they've been on the run for months and I doubt there's a salon open anywhere.

Now, that last sentence is just me being  facetious and snarky but it goes to what I really don't like about "Falling Skies" in general.  Given its great provenance (writer/producer Robert Rodat, Steven Spielberg exec producer) I just expected more.

This show is too pendantic.  Too monotonous in parts.  Too predictable.  It's just not believable in any way and it's filled with too many recycled scifi concepts and looks - like the ED209-looking Mechs but don't get me started on that stuff.

I know, as a scifi writer, that you're faced with a huge task when creating a world that no one's seen before. And post-apocalyptic anything is a challenge to do right.  But "Falling Skies" just won't go to places dirtier and grittier which it really needs to do to distinguish itself.

300 people on the move is a lot of folks to feed, water and everything else (where do all those people poop and what do they wipe with?)  Fights, deaths, rapes, murders - all that stuff has got to happen in a group like this living on the edge of their humanity - and yet everyone is so reasonable and basically well-behaved.  They even have a school for the youngsters that is farcically and  "reasonably" taught - why in the world would they be teaching kids biology when they need fighters?  I'd have shown the rug rats killing things - that's their job now - survival, not higher ed (or at the very least they should be dissecting the alien Skitters, right?  How cool would that be? Alien Autopsy, 'yo.)  

Imagine how many kids would have been horribly killed by these aliens; the first thing I'm gonna do is arm those little people so they can at least potentially survive an attack.  But instead, there's this "reasonable" setup of 100 fighters guarding 200 civilians and never the twain shall cross or meet.

 In a word, bullshit.

Coming into this story post-invasion, with all these systems set up already does  the series a disservice.  I'd have started from the day of the invasion and worked forward - or at least flashed back a bit to their recent, previous lives.  Maybe that's coming but it seems if they had intedended that they'd have done it already.

I just couldn't buy into the whole scenario.  I couldn't "suspend disbelief" as it's called for long enough to really enjoy this show.  Maybe I'll get beyond that in the future - I did stick this on a Season Pass to see if it improves - but given the overall approach to this world, I honestly don't think it will.  

If you like scifi and have nothing else to watch then "Falling Skies" is a good distraction.  But if it doesn't get more compelling quickly by adding some grittier and more intense moments by the survivors, I'm not sure this series will survive the initial 10-ep "invasion" to our home media centers.

"Falling Skies" plays on Sundays on TNT. 

Oh, and not for nothing, TNT, but  "limited commerical interruption" must mean different things to you than it does to everyone else because I had to fast forward through about sixty freaking commercials.

Read 1593 times Last modified on Wednesday, 05 August 2015 16:16
Published in Front Page Item - old
Mark Sevi

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