Safetylight

This wasn't anything ground breaking, but it was sweet, simple and flawless.

I'd gone and given up on Kevin Smith several pictures back, feared he'd lost his brain to Hollywood. But this was an honest bit of film making.

He wasn't flexing, mind you. He's just jogging at that comfortable pace where he's already strained and sweated to build his muscles. Now he's just using them effectively.

Ain't nothing wrong with that. In a world where simple competence and a nice story are hard to come by, I'll take it.

Let some other up and coming kid break the sweat and chart new territory. I'm happy going for a leisurely jog in the park with Kevin, thanks. We can talk movies.

What the heck did I just watch?

I'd think this was a South Park or Strong Bad parody of the whole anime form, except that it was directed by a Japanese guy at a Japanese anime studio with a Japanese team.

So what the heck was it?

It employed all of the cliched style-over-substance meaningless nonsense you've seen before when an otherwise normal anime series rolls (finally) into the last couple of episodes and the directors and writers have all apparently suffered aneurysms at the same time (probably due to overwork and not enough sunlight), and nobody knows how to finish the story off logically and so they drift into a weird naval gazing 'philosophical' series of existential dream sequences which even they can't interpret.

Think of the last episode of "Neon Genesis Evangelion". Serious WTF-ery.

Every third anime series I've foolishly inflicted upon myself on the recommendation of people I should know better than to listen to seems to end that way, with animators bleeding from their ears and the viewer walking away stunned and confused.

Maybe Rick & Morty is where burned out directors are put to pasture.

Whatever.

Here's to hoping this was indeed a one-off and they'll never, ever do it again.

Or if it's like the Animatrix, they manage pull at least one decent work created in good conscience out of the bag and let the rest sail quickly down the memory hole.

So.., the author of the book apparently worked closely with the Apple production. -Blake Crouch even wrote a few of the episodes himself, so.., this isn't a bad adaptation with regard to respecting the original work.

That being said...

Blake Crouch is a mid-weight author. Always has been.

"Wayward Pines", (one of his first books), had a great hook, but the hauled in catch was.. mediocre and uninspired.

"Dark Matter" doesn't really demonstrate that he has grown much as an author. There is plenty in the story which makes me roll my eyes. I will say that the human motivations of his characters seem somewhat more matured, presumably as Crouch himself has grown into adulthood and parenthood. But they still also suffer from juvenile world views and narrow focus. These are not complex characters. I would venture that they are hopelessly material in their conceptions of what people are. -And all art suffers when materialism is the ground zero Faith being drawn from.

For some reason, when materialism is King, a person's understanding of physics and science, also suffers. Isn't that ironic? You really need to be cozy with Spirit in order to properly work in science. (It's not really ironic at all; it becomes obvious to the earnest scientist if he's doing it right.) Dark Matter is driven by broken concepts.

Okay.., what do I mean by that?

Here's an example: The superposition travelers who use the Box can appear in any identical Box. Okay, great. But the Box itself isn't in superposition. Only the space inside it. So that means it should only be able to take people to a lab where an identical Box was constructed.

And yet the show has Jason opening up Boxes which somehow exist beneath highway underpasses, in deserts, jungles and other places where the probability of a Box having been constructed is nil. You need a specialized physics lab and a team of scientists and engineers to build a box. You can't do that beside a congested highway overpass or on a sub-arctic glacial tundra.

But in Dark Matter, the boxes just seem to 'be' in the most unlikely places, to have always been there, and to raise no curiosity in the people (if there are any) in the worlds they pop into. Under a highway cloverleaf, for goodness sake! What? Did the engineers truck materials in and construct a Box with traffic rumbling around them? Why? How? -Or, did the lab get torn down to make way for a highway construction project, (in the two years since the Box was brought on line), and the only thing they left behind.., was the Box??

So that's all silly. Stupid, even.

But for the sake of the show, you need to allow a miracle or two. Fine. We'll suspend disbelief for the sake of entertainment. The Box itself travels, not just the occupants. Whatever.

However.., what I'm going to offer here is this: Great writers don't beg for miracles. They create them.

Readers who are handed miracles are wowed, and those stories become popular, even culture-defining. It's not light entertainment anymore.

Jurassic Park was one such example. -The Fantastic only required plausible circumstances, not that the laws of physics and biology be canceled. Dinosaur clones felt like they could really happen, if only the right people and the right investment came along. And so readers were Wowed, their imaginations sparked alight by the tantalizing promise of "What if..!?"

Dark Matter just makes me groan. "The idea doesn't work. Why are you wasting my time? -And this certainly isn't 'Back to the Future' where an exciting and jubilant execution is ample reimbursement for the necessary miracle audiences had to pay to play."

The sad part is that it COULD have worked. -If Box travel only ever took people to the same (or similar) lab, then the concept WOULD have been plausible. It would have indicated that the author/s were aware of what they were doing, of the limitations of their own stated rules and were willing to not break them. The problems which arise when facing actual obstacles would have been genuinely interesting and have demanded creative solutions. (How do we get out of the Box without getting shot or causing a fuss with the engineers? There are tons of cool possible solutions which would have tantalized people's imaginations, made for a great story. But instead they were either foolish or lazy, and so I don't care. A story which breaks its own rules doesn't matter, no stress matters because if it becomes too hard, the writers will just cheat.

Perhaps not surprisingly, that kind of blundering lack of insight or understanding of one's own topic, indicates a naivete which spreads to all other subjects as well.

Nothing in this show is terribly insightful or refined. It's all rote pattern with no spark.

Maybe when Blake Crouch lives another 100 lives and accrues more wisdom and experience, he might come back and try writing again. For now, however...

6/10 because it's an honest attempt within limited means.