I finished watching the 2 hour premiere of Falling Skies last night. I cannot image what would entice me to come back and watch another hour.
I was very hopeful as I started watching. I didn’t know much about the show except that it was another “human’s fight off alien invasion” story. But it has Steven Spielberg as executive producer, Robert Rodat as creator, and a great cast with Will Patton, Noah Wyle, and Moon Bloodgood. Then why was I so bored?
It felt like I was watching a pastiche of different post-apocalyptic and alien invasion stories. In fact, had the aliens not made an appearance I might have thought I was watching a “flash forward to the future” episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles or some other new Terminator story. Only it wasn’t making as much sense and it was far more predictable.
I’m not going to post some long ranting review, but here are a few reasons I won’t be watching again:
- Why is the motivation of the aliens a mystery? I know Lost encouraged a swarm of TV shows to present mysteries as a means of getting viewers to tune in, but I don’t think that works here (and hasn’t really worked anywhere else either). Can humans really have no idea what the aliens want and why they would destroy the world to get it?
- It can’t be that they invaded the Earth to make human children slaves with semi-biological control collars along their spines (a la The Puppet Masters ). Why would you enslave the smallest, weakest humans? Why would you need to do so if you have the technology to cross light years of space and destroy whole civilizations? Couldn’t you build a robot to do something other than shoot at rebel humans (with very poor aim)?
- And if you happen to have that kind of technology, couldn’t you manage to spot a group of 300 human rebels marching down a highway and through a town in broad daylight? Could you only manage to find them if they fire their rifles or light flares? And could you really only target the flares?
- A gang leader of a small group with plenty of guns that takes hostages from the military rebels so that he can get a really big run so that he can… Wait, what was he going to do with a .50 machine gun mounted in the back of a car? (And why a car rather than a truck?).
It felt like I was watching an apocalyptic alien invasion show from the 1980’s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQBC1H-t9Q0
Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I were still 12.
