…still fails to impress.  I get a real Attack of the Clones vibe from this movie the more I see of it and I don’t think I’m the first person to write that down.  Much of the production design looks like it was lifted from other films.  It still resembles a video game.  And from the looks of it, some of the CG looks just a tad unnatural. 

There are glimpses of the kind of movie-making at which Cameron typically excels.  “You get me what I need, I’ll see to it you get your legs back.  Your real legs.”

Some moments lack any hint of subtext.  “We’re going up against gunships with bows and arrows.”

Then there are glimpses of inspiring moments that fail to inspire.  “They’ve sent us a message that they can take whatever they want.  Well, we will send them a message: that this, this is our land!”

In 23 years we’ve come from “Get away from her you bitch!” to “this is our land!”

(shakes head)

Still…it’s a three-hour film and this is only a three-minute trailer.  Internet video often pales to an IMAX screen, and the greater resolution may improve the rendered CGI.  The only thing keeping this on the must-see radar, however, is the promise of stereoscopic 3-D. 

And that’s a real shame.

I get traffic from people searching for this quote almost daily.  Aaron Sorkin paraphrased it twice–once on Sports Night, and again on The West Wing.  I’ve used it before too, once in describing Harry’s role in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Sorkin’s paraphrase goes like this: “As if it matters how a man falls down.  When the fall is all that’s left, it matters very much.”

The line comes from The Lion in Winter, as Prince Geoffrey and Prince Richard find themselves in the dungeon, believing they hear their father’s approach…

Richard: He’s here. He’ll get no satisfaction out of me. He isn’t going to see me beg.
Geoffrey: My you chivalric fool… as if the way one fell down mattered.
Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters.

And here it is in living color! (Unfortunately, the only YouTube video I found that displays this scene refuses to let me embed it–click the link and enjoy.)

Why do you find it so hard to believe?

Let’s get it out of the way: Lost changed things for television.  Every year since its 2004 premiere, networks have tried to emulate its magic, with varying degrees of success.  This year’s entry from ABC is FlashForward.  It carries the same network logo, a pair of familiar faces, even a billboard advertising a certain ill-fated airline.  But while FlashForward’s spin on the Lost paradigm captures its sense of oddity, it lacks the patience and sense to let the audience engage on its own. 

We open on a man who wakes to find a disaster.  Instead of a doctor, we learn he’s a federal agent.  Instead of an island, we find him in Los Angeles.  Instead of a plane crash, everything has crashed—cars, helicopters, you name it.  It’s happened all over the world.  For two minutes, everyone on the planet blacks out, and glimpses their lives six months in the future. 

The pilot’s opening tease, including the brief flashback to fill us in on the jolting intro, suffers from narrative ADD.  In nine minutes, we’re introduced to ten separate characters with five interconnected storylines.  And that’s all before the “event” even takes place. 

In comparison, Lost dropped us into a world of chaos and let everything unfold through the eyes of one man—Jack Shepherd.  In that first opening salvo, we glimpse the faces of every major player, but we see it all through Jack’s eyes.  He’s our conduit.  Through his heroic actions, he’s the first to earn our sympathies, and our loyalty. 

The frontrunner of FlashForward is FBI agent Mark Benford (capably played by Joseph Fiennes).  He never has a chance to earn our loyalty.  The narrative instead picks up threads involving various folk in Mark’s life; including his wife (Lost’s Sonja Walger), her suicidal associate, Bryce (Zachary Knighton); Mark’s partner, Demetri (John Cho); and Mark’s AA sponsor, Aaron (Brian F. O’Byrne).  All of whom might become interesting characters in future installments, but for now, they’re simply ciphers for examining the myriad implications of the “event.” 

Certain production aspects undermine the effort in selling the premise.  Take sound, for instance.  At one moment, as Mark and Demetri try to help the wounded on a wrecked LA freeway, the sound of an explosion diverts their attention to a helicopter that’s just crashed into a building.  The building and the helicopter sit maybe a mile away, easily a part of the LA skyline.  We hear the sound as the incident occurs, and our heroes react. 

Sound, however, has to travel in real life.  Consider a similar moment in the film Red Dawn.  Just after enemy troops land in Small Town, USA, Patrick Swayze and a group of survivors drive into a fuel station to collect provisions.  Swayze’s character looks to the mountains, searching for a place for all of them to hide.  The shot frames his face, we see a fireball erupt in the field behind him, but we don’t hear the sound just yet.  The boom follows shortly after, like thunder after a distant lightning strike.  Maybe it’s a quibble, but it helps to sell the make believe premise if I’ve already bought the make believe world. 

Based on the novel by Robert J. Sawyer, FlashForward comes to life through the writing talents of David Goyer (Dark City, the Blade trilogy) and Brannon Braga (Star Trek: TNG, 24), both able writers who know how to produce solid work.  For now, they need to stop and take a breath before inundating the audience with on-the-nose exposition spelling out the multiple facts and clues of the narrative.

And we have a heap of clues.  Each person’s flash forward presents an enigma that hopes to set up a future pay off.  Mark sees himself investigating the event, just before masked villains show up with guns.  One character sees a relative once believed dead.  Another sees nothing.  Whenever a story attempts to weave time travel (or, in this case, one of its derivatives) into the narrative, it lends opportunity to explore wonderful questions regarding chance and destiny, faithfulness and belief, what we know and what we hope.  Herein lays this story’s greatest potential, and most threatening obstacle. 

Lost’s success depended on creating characters interesting enough to hold our interest even when answers to the mystery were long in coming.  FlashForward seems to drop the audience into the world and expect us to hang on for the ride. 

Alex Wainer, who writes at The Culture Beat, nails it when he writes that the show “gives us mysteries, but little mystery.”  For now, it’s a compelling enough beginning to bring us back for the next installment.  The flash forwards have worked to earn a little sympathy.  The pilot ends on a clever twist that raises our curiosity.  Next, it must earn our loyalty.  So far, it hasn’t. 

FlashForward airs Thursday nights at 8/7c on ABC.

(also posted at Blogcritics)

The Prisoner premieres Sunday, November 15, 2009.  AMC “will air two episodes each night over three consecutive nights.”

Read about it here.

See the nine-minute trailer here.

Can’t wait!

Orson Scott Card on Star Trek and Captain Kirk:

Centering the series around a commanding officer was such a bad mistake that the show immediately corrected for the error by never, for one moment, having Kirk behave like a captain.

While a television show can get away with having a captain who acts like the leader of an exploratory team, the readers of prose science fiction have no tolerance for such nonsense.

(Card, Orson Scott.  How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy.  The Writer’s Digest Genre Writing Series.  Writer’s Digest Books: Cincinnati.  1990.)

And now, a word from John Locke (Lost 1.09 “All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues” — minor language warning):

According to both AMC and IMDB, The Prisoner has no official release date.  Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellan star in the remake of Patrick McGoohan’s cult classic.

AMC’s web site only mentions the November 2009 time frame, and IMDB hints that the mini-series will span six episodes.  Other than that, details are scarce.

Producers have touted the new mini-series as a reimagining of the original, which has angered some purists.  At the San Diego Comic-Con, the creative team seemed to express that Patrick McGoohan supported the project before his death.

The nine minute trailer unveiled at the Con suggests the reimagined tale broaches themes of identity, faith and belief, and concepts of freedom–all useful components in modern myth making.

If Battlestar Galactica is any indication, remakes and reimaginings can work, and sometimes even surpass the original.

In The Prisoner, “Number Six” (Jim Caviezel) finds himself trapped in an isolated environment known as “The Village,” whose inhabitants refer to themselves by number rather than name, under the control of the enigmatic “Number Two” (Ian McKellan).

You only think you’re free…

Residents of Colorado Springs: According to KVOR, it’s snowing in Briargate.

While film novelizations tend to sit in the realm of the literary gutter, a small handful have managed transcend the stigma.  Most notably is Orson Scott Card’s, The Abyss.  Lesser known, however, is Alan Dean Foster’s riff on the original Alien. 

Finding a copy of either one of these is a challenge — novelizations on average will only see one printing before they wind up on a rack inside a used book store.  But I spotted a copy of Alien sitting in the window of one this week. 

I snagged it for a buck fifty.

See the news here!