saul-jephcott

I had to tick the spoiler box even though I'm convinced it would be difficult to spoil something as grim and tiresome as this. A cast of fine, talented actors convincingly portray... Tattooed greasy haired illiterates killing each other over some filthy lucre. Rockwell's bearded, sweaty, unintelligible,(though unflinchingly accurate) protagonist is about as much fun to watch as a home video of someone's colonoscopy. The forests of Canada do an interesting though slightly confusing job of standing in for... West Virginia? The endless rain and grey skies quickly inform us that "This is a darkly realistic thriller" or some such, and you can feel your brow furrowing to match that of the hero. Without doubt, the film's crowning glory is its symbolic end scene: Sam Rockwell digs himself a hole so deep that he can't climb out, and after an interminable amount of time, he drags another actor down into the pit with him, and slowly dies....

Of boredom.

I confess to having had high hopes for this show. I'm not going to bother to re hash the complaints that many others have already posted here about logical inconsistencies, but there are two things that are really irritating me: Firstly, one of the main thrusts of the storyline seems to be a group of "rebels" trying to restore the good old U.S of A, since the lights out has plunged it into a dark, militia ruled dictatorship, headed up by the requisite soft voiced psycho and his gang of ruthless henchmen. incidentally, this group of characters has been shamelessly copied from 'The Postman', right down to the costumes and the fact that they're all branded with a letter like cattle. The moment when the ridiculously gorgeous white toothed, Hispanic 2nd lead passionately tells her deep voiced, cynical yet deep down heroic ex lover, "I want my baby to be born in America!", had me reaching for my jingoistic vomit bag. The second main theme is "How can we turn the power back on?". This troubles me because we're supposed to believe that after 15 years of surviving in a rural, agrarian, post electronic world, the automatic desire of the majority of humankind is to return to where we are today.

Good science fiction usually challenges us with a view of worlds where the paradigm is shifted, where values are different,and where the protagonists are not simply echoing and endorsing today's accepted values, while wearing funny costumes.