But Another Life deserves a bit more fair of a review than I gave it in the other thread. It's not good, no change there, and likely not worth the recommendation. But it's also not a complete shitstorm, just like a moderate guster of a shitstorm. D+, C- I guess?
The Good: Katee acts well, as she usually does. I think she's a bit like Nathan Fillion or a handful of others. Underrated actor who generally picks/gets roles in really bad projects. The writing team had a decent end point to get to for the first (and I'm guessing, only) series. Finally, they really tried for Sense 8 in Space, in terms of relationships and a (mostly) progressive view on how the boot-knocking works for us silly humans.
The Bad: They had an endpoint. That's pretty much it. They really had no idea how to get there, where to start, or how to establish world-building at all. The dialogue is really painful at times. Characters other than Katee are pretty much going to bounce all over the place, in terms of characterization. They'll jump back and forth from one broadly painted stereotype/trope to the next, without much rhyme or reason. They tried to do Sense 8 in Space, and really didn't want to put the time or effort in for what made Sense8 work. So it didn't really work very well. Selma Blair's character is an utter trainwreck, but I honestly can't judge if the problem is her acting or just how bad the material was. Pretty much every role on Earth is a gigantic mess, as are most of the storylines involving Earth.
The Really Horrid: It's sci-fi word salad, with no regard for consistency in tech or capabilities. To be fair, the budget on this looks extremely small. So I think a lot of that comes from budgetary concerns paired with bad writing that doesn't want to do the science work. I'd call it space fantasy, but it goes far past that. It attempts to portray itself as hard sci-fi, but then manages to spit out things like particle accelerator powered fusion reactors (yup) on a ship with fully functional artificial gravity and FTL, gravity rings on the ship that are completely unconnected in every shot and just randomly float around the ship somehow, but then uses Vietnam era M16s (not even hidden) and 1970's-80's era NASA EVA tech. No thruster packs, no grav boots, just tethers and handholds. We can literally handle EVA thruster packs now, and could in the 1980's. And all of this is explained away by just throwing as many "sci-fi-y" sounding terms together as one can. It doesn't matter if it makes even the slightest bit of sense. Just toss them together, and everybody will be fine with it! The writing is definitely the worst part about the show.Statistics: Posted by El Jefe — Mon Aug 05, 2019 8:34 pm
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