I could've sworn I saw a topic on here about the TV miniseries "V." Well, since the topic was just "V" I guess it could have been about
the letter v. Can't find it now, so I'm making a new one! Anyways, they had a marathon showing the original miniseries on the SciFi channel (or SyFi,
as they are calling themselves now.) It's bloody brilliant.
V
| Author | Comment | ||
|---|---|---|---|
 greybob.flyingomelettes... |
V |
Lead | |
|
(11/02/09 01:14:45) |
|
||
 Sweetbee |
V | ||
|
(11/02/09 03:42:38) Alucalb |
Was the video thread.
I watched the old V when I was young, it was pretty cool. |
||
|
Crawl and 1OOO |
|||
|
(11/02/09 07:43:45) |
I used to watch this show when I was a kid, though my memories of it are rather disjoint by now.
One thing that was disturbing enough for me to remember was when that one female alien killed a male one (her superior?) -- he was wearing his human mask at the time, and the way she killed him resulted in the corpse having the reptile and human features melt into each other. Then she was buried alive with him. At one time in the series, a popular character was hit by a laser beam and was disintegrated. A lot of the kids in my grade school seemed like they couldn't accept that a character they liked was just gone. They came up with explanations like, he wasn't really dead, the laser just shrunk him to the point that you couldn't see him anymore. And this mini-character might still come back in later episodes! I also read a novel based on the series (like the Star Wars Extended Universe) when I was a kid. Even though I was only about ten at the time, and even though it was kind of entertaining for what it was, it was obviously written ... uh ... with only commercial interest. Like, one of the main characters was a (real life, I believe) professional football player. |
||
|
Crawl and 1OOO |
|||
|
(11/02/09 17:07:07) |
Looks like that was "The Florida Project".
And, no, the football player does not seem to be based on a real-life person. "Of the three ways in which men think that they acquire a knowledge of things--authority, reasoning, and experience--only the last is effective and able to bring peace to the intellect." -Roger Bacon |
||
|
greybob.flyingomelettes... |
|||
|
(11/04/09 23:37:48) |
Ok, so I watched the final part of the original miniseries tonight, and man does it contain one of the more embarrassing instances of deus ex machina that
I've ever seen. So there's this little girl who's a hybrid human/visitor, and in the final hour the visitors decide to self-destruct their ship in
a huge nuclear explosion. The girl just waltzes up to the self-destruct control panel, and, well, I'm not sure exactly what the heck happens. She like,
interfaces with the controls, and there's lots of weird glowing effects and it's never explained. Anyways, she somehow stops the self-destruct
sequence.
So the miniseries is really good at building suspense in places, but the build-up is usually better than the pay-off, sadly. Still a pretty good series, but not exactly a masterpiece. I still need to see the 80's series, and I'm curious to see the new series to see how it compares. |
||
|
Crawl and 1OOO |
|||
|
(11/24/09 22:15:56) |
I don't remember the original series very well, but to a kid the appeal was pretty simple: You got aliens, you have huge motherships, you got reptile
monsters under fake human skin. For a kid, that's pretty much all you need. But I'm an adult now.
I've seen two episodes of the modern show (tonight's and last week's). I think it will be very difficult for a show with its premise to go anywhere intelligent. They'd have to answer: -Why do the aliens need us? -Why do they need to be sneaky about it? If the motivation is just that they want to enslave us or steal our planet's resources, I don't think it makes sense. Another issue I have is, Why is it such a big deal that the aliens don't really look like humans? That wouldn't prove that they're evil. Nor, in the original series, would eating a rat whole really prove that they're evil. That's just a very childish perspective on evil (different and gross = evil). That they don't really look like humans doesn't even prove they're deceitful, really. It could just mean they're trying to make a good impression. What was their motivation with the cooked flu vaccine? Just to kill some random people? They have all that technology, and that's the best they can do, and the best way they can do it? It doesn't seem to make sense. |
||
|
greybob.flyingomelettes... |
|||
|
(11/24/09 23:11:45) |
Although I enjoyed it, the original wasn't exactly intelligent, either, and had some of the same problems. Like the thing with the human skins: the
visitors are shown as wearing their disguises and speaking English even in private. This, despite the fact that the first episode establishes that they have
their own language, and the main character even overhears them discussing their evil plans in English!
The eating rats/ reptilian creatures= evil thing kind of bugs me, too. But it's not like they don't do plenty of nasty things to the humans. Like kidnapping them and storing them in their motherships as food. There's also sympathetic visitors in the original. I haven't seen the new series, so I don't even know if you're talking about the original or the new one. If you're talking about the new one, it sounds very close to the original. Which begs the question, if they weren't going to change anything, or "update" it in any way, what's the point of the new series even existing. One thing that sounds different is that thing about a flu vaccine. In the original, the Visitors promised a cure for cancer. So, I guess that was sort of an update of that. I'm seeing if I can't get a hold of DVDs of the original miniseries. If I can, I'm thinking of doing something with them for my site. I have to admit, a big part of the appeal of the original is the sheer cheese-factor, so it's practically a goldmine of potential hilarity. |
||
|
Crawl and 1OOO |
|||
|
(11/26/09 21:39:01) |
They already killed Steve the Pirate.
"Of the three ways in which men think that they acquire a knowledge of things--authority, reasoning, and experience--only the last is effective and able to bring peace to the intellect." -Roger Bacon |
||
