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newnumber6The Prisoner.
Man, that was just awful. A story of a very boring man trying to figure out a deep, complex mystery that I don't give a damn about, told in a pointlessly complicated way.
None of the charm, wit, subtlety of the original. It's like they just decided to take some of the trappings of the original and graft it on to a crap story and cardboard characters, and throw in heaping amounts of weirdness and discontinuity and hope we think that reminds us of the original.
(major spoilers ahoy, of course)
I don't object strenuously to some of the basic divergences... everyone thinking the village is all there is, for example, but it wasn't done well, and it didn't consider what about the original made it interesting. I do object a little, because amnesia as a plot device isn't usually interesting (there's a line somewhere, I'm paraphrasing of course, about, if you have your characters having no idea what's going on, it's too often because YOU have no idea what to write), but I could get past it. Everybody thinking their artificial world is all it is, does remind me of that movie "The Island" a few years ago, and that's not a pleasant comparison.
Here's the thing. If you stripped away pretty much all the 'trappings' of the Prisoner... people being numbers instead of names, the funky architecture and colorings, Rover, it still makes a decent story at its heart (ignoring, of course, the ending, I mean the setup of a spy imprisoned by a group of people seeking to break information out of him, and his efforts to resist). This one, you don't get that (ignoring the ending or not). Strip away the trappings of The Prisoner, you get could make very much the same movie... and it would still be a boring mess. The trappings aren't even at all important here. There's no real reason why people have to be Numbers in this world, for example. It's not meant to be a deliberately dehumanizing place. Most of the other elements of the original are deliberately placed there and are at best unimportant nods to the original, at worse work against the plot they're trying to set up.
Firstly, 6 himself was interesting in the original. He was a spy. He had a motive. He had a secret to keep and a reason to keep it (even if it was 'personal'. He couldn't get out, but he kept trying and treated it like a game between him and his captors.
Not-6 (he doesn't even deserve the number) is just a very confused (and dull) guy with no memory trapped in a place that he believes is not the only place there is, with the rest of the world conspiring to... not let him get out. That's it. They don't seem to be trying to do anything to him, just convince him that's where he belongs and keep him from escaping, the latter of which is pretty easy to do with miles of impassable desert around you and shifting landscapes. He's not even especially interesting or novel in his going about it, in investigating the limits to his universe. Even what we see about his outside world life... he's dull.
And Jim Caviezel (sp) was not a good choice for Not-6. Him shouting "I AM NOT A NUMBER I AM A FREE MAN" (and various other things shouted impotently at the gates to Two's place while he ate cake) was just painful. Painful. I literally winced it was so bad.
The world doesn't feel interesting or self-consistent. I suppose, given the solution to the 'great mystery', that makes sense, but that only makes it less interesting. If anything can happen, reality can change on a dime, who cares what happens? I don't. On a plot level... with conformity enforced (except for 6, who they just try to convince gently), surveillance accepted everywhere (except everybody still gets away with everything), being a 'dreamer' (having a dream about the outside world) is somehow a crime warranting a secret police (except for 6, who they don't really care about and just try to convince gently that he's wrong). Everybody understands all sorts of references, except to things like trains, everybody knows everybody else but few seems to know Six before they meet him or think it's odd that they don't, people think Six, like everybody else, has been there his whole life, yet feel the need to explain things to him ("Every once in a while something like this (big explosions in diners) happens").
Things happen and then don't seem to have any consequences.
It's also dull in large parts. There's stretches where I wanted to do something else. This was true of the Prisoner series at times (whole episodes were, frankly, padding), but the character was engaging enough to even sit through most of those (except, maybe, Living in Harmony).
As to the mystery itself... That it was some kind of manufactured/simulated reality was telegraphed from the first episode (shining translucent towers in the distance immediately rule out any possibility that it's happening "for real"), but still, "It was all a dream" has long ceased to be a good explanation for anything for me. The village as a collective dream, produced with magic drugs to snare people and 'help them' against their will... bah. It just sucked. It did make marginally more sense than the conclusion to the original, mind you, but they had an excuse - it was the 60s (really, that's all the excuse you needed).
It did lead to the one genuine surprising development, the revelation that the 'flashbacks' weren't flashbacks at all for the most part, but actually happening in parallel to the story in the Village. But that was a good idea trapped in the wrong project.
About the only other good thing in it was the acting of Ian McKellen, but even he couldn't save this stinker. All he does is provide the crap with a temporary, illusionary, veneer of profundity. If you loved the original, stay away. If you didn't, I don't think it's worth watching.
In other, happier news (at least as far as anything which will inevitably have a tragic, horribly unfair ending can be happy news), apparently work's beginning on producing a full follow-up to Doctor Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog. Song-writing work rather than actual production, but yay, it's something! Whedon, if you get stumped for ideas, I'm willing to give up all rights on my awesome ideas for a good superhero team played entirely by Firefly stars.
Man, that was just awful. A story of a very boring man trying to figure out a deep, complex mystery that I don't give a damn about, told in a pointlessly complicated way.
None of the charm, wit, subtlety of the original. It's like they just decided to take some of the trappings of the original and graft it on to a crap story and cardboard characters, and throw in heaping amounts of weirdness and discontinuity and hope we think that reminds us of the original.
(major spoilers ahoy, of course)
I don't object strenuously to some of the basic divergences... everyone thinking the village is all there is, for example, but it wasn't done well, and it didn't consider what about the original made it interesting. I do object a little, because amnesia as a plot device isn't usually interesting (there's a line somewhere, I'm paraphrasing of course, about, if you have your characters having no idea what's going on, it's too often because YOU have no idea what to write), but I could get past it. Everybody thinking their artificial world is all it is, does remind me of that movie "The Island" a few years ago, and that's not a pleasant comparison.
Here's the thing. If you stripped away pretty much all the 'trappings' of the Prisoner... people being numbers instead of names, the funky architecture and colorings, Rover, it still makes a decent story at its heart (ignoring, of course, the ending, I mean the setup of a spy imprisoned by a group of people seeking to break information out of him, and his efforts to resist). This one, you don't get that (ignoring the ending or not). Strip away the trappings of The Prisoner, you get could make very much the same movie... and it would still be a boring mess. The trappings aren't even at all important here. There's no real reason why people have to be Numbers in this world, for example. It's not meant to be a deliberately dehumanizing place. Most of the other elements of the original are deliberately placed there and are at best unimportant nods to the original, at worse work against the plot they're trying to set up.
Firstly, 6 himself was interesting in the original. He was a spy. He had a motive. He had a secret to keep and a reason to keep it (even if it was 'personal'. He couldn't get out, but he kept trying and treated it like a game between him and his captors.
Not-6 (he doesn't even deserve the number) is just a very confused (and dull) guy with no memory trapped in a place that he believes is not the only place there is, with the rest of the world conspiring to... not let him get out. That's it. They don't seem to be trying to do anything to him, just convince him that's where he belongs and keep him from escaping, the latter of which is pretty easy to do with miles of impassable desert around you and shifting landscapes. He's not even especially interesting or novel in his going about it, in investigating the limits to his universe. Even what we see about his outside world life... he's dull.
And Jim Caviezel (sp) was not a good choice for Not-6. Him shouting "I AM NOT A NUMBER I AM A FREE MAN" (and various other things shouted impotently at the gates to Two's place while he ate cake) was just painful. Painful. I literally winced it was so bad.
The world doesn't feel interesting or self-consistent. I suppose, given the solution to the 'great mystery', that makes sense, but that only makes it less interesting. If anything can happen, reality can change on a dime, who cares what happens? I don't. On a plot level... with conformity enforced (except for 6, who they just try to convince gently), surveillance accepted everywhere (except everybody still gets away with everything), being a 'dreamer' (having a dream about the outside world) is somehow a crime warranting a secret police (except for 6, who they don't really care about and just try to convince gently that he's wrong). Everybody understands all sorts of references, except to things like trains, everybody knows everybody else but few seems to know Six before they meet him or think it's odd that they don't, people think Six, like everybody else, has been there his whole life, yet feel the need to explain things to him ("Every once in a while something like this (big explosions in diners) happens").
Things happen and then don't seem to have any consequences.
It's also dull in large parts. There's stretches where I wanted to do something else. This was true of the Prisoner series at times (whole episodes were, frankly, padding), but the character was engaging enough to even sit through most of those (except, maybe, Living in Harmony).
As to the mystery itself... That it was some kind of manufactured/simulated reality was telegraphed from the first episode (shining translucent towers in the distance immediately rule out any possibility that it's happening "for real"), but still, "It was all a dream" has long ceased to be a good explanation for anything for me. The village as a collective dream, produced with magic drugs to snare people and 'help them' against their will... bah. It just sucked. It did make marginally more sense than the conclusion to the original, mind you, but they had an excuse - it was the 60s (really, that's all the excuse you needed).
It did lead to the one genuine surprising development, the revelation that the 'flashbacks' weren't flashbacks at all for the most part, but actually happening in parallel to the story in the Village. But that was a good idea trapped in the wrong project.
About the only other good thing in it was the acting of Ian McKellen, but even he couldn't save this stinker. All he does is provide the crap with a temporary, illusionary, veneer of profundity. If you loved the original, stay away. If you didn't, I don't think it's worth watching.
In other, happier news (at least as far as anything which will inevitably have a tragic, horribly unfair ending can be happy news), apparently work's beginning on producing a full follow-up to Doctor Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog. Song-writing work rather than actual production, but yay, it's something! Whedon, if you get stumped for ideas, I'm willing to give up all rights on my awesome ideas for a good superhero team played entirely by Firefly stars.
