REVIEW: V
"V" is my absolute favorite sci-fi television series of all time. "V" rules the world so much that it also rules the world that the reptile aliens came from. If you get your hands on the new DVD sets of "V: The Original Series," "V: The Final Battle," and "V: The Series," you will have something in the range of twenty-nine hours of fantastically entertaining sci-fi pulp and soap opera.
"V" began with Kenneth Johnson's idea of telling the story of the French Resistance to the Nazi campaign during World War II. Network execs, still flabbergasted at the continuing success of stuff like "Star Wars," suggested to Johnson that maybe the Nazis...could be aliens instead. At least this is what I read when I troll websites all night long, but the original miniseries has Johnson commentary, so you can listen to him talk about it. At any rate, the French Resistance became the Human Resistance, and the Nazis became Reptilian Aliens that wore outfits that looked like Nazi uniforms and had a big swastika-ish design as their logo. In fact, the first half of the original miniseries is so completely taken with the allegory that it's almost as if the script is reaching through your TV screen and occupying your living room in the name of Der Fuhrer. The fact that just one of the characters (Leonardo Cimino) realizes that the aliens are awfully similar to Hitler's army is a little bit improbable, but since it's the same actor that played the Scary German Guy from "The Monster Squad," I let it slide.
Once the allegory initial thickness wears down, the real "V" comes out. I understand that the original intent was to have the allegory be the grounding of the show, but the budget, the cheap effects, the costumes, and the entire 1983 style relegate the show to the status of an updated Flash Gordon serial. It's really hard to take it seriously, as a viewer in 2004, when aliens wearing pointy-shouldered leotards shoot shoddily-animated laser blasts at the Tight-Blue-Jean Resistance that reacts to things that happen off-screen a lot. The real show is the soap opera, a grand and silly drama that plays out like a cross between Buck Rogers and Guiding Light. The "Final Battle" and "The Series" are wonderful fun, and are completely engrossing if you look past their quite obvious shortcomings.
The Visitors, as the aliens are called, come to earth in giant motherships that hover over major cities; keep in mind that this show pre-dates "Independence Day" by over a decade. They eventually send an envoy to speak with the people of the world: all they want is some of our water resources, in exchange for their superior technology and science. Sure, we say! Before you know it, things are getting out of hand: scientists are disappearing, children are turning into V-Youth, and eventually martial law is declared across the world, with the Visitors holding the reigns. Then, voila, one of them gets their face ripped off. EGADS! A reptile! Turns out, they're just here to harvest humans for munchies, and maybe catch some sun on a nice warm rock if they've got the time. Thus, Mike Donovon, Juliet Parrish, Ham Tyler, and bucketloads of characters -- these suckers have a lot of main characters, nineteen off the top of my head -- decide to take back the earth. Silliness and action ensue! Drama! Romance! Laserguns! Reptiles! Red Dust! Action! Action! Action!
Most of the main cast returned to work in the weekly series, and it was noted as being a pretty terrible show. The scripts are pretty dodgy, the effects range from mediocre to "Man, I could do that on my iMac," and the plot holes are large enough to fly a mothership through. We're talking the kind of show where the Resistance leaders sneak into the V Headquarters in just about every episode simply by donning a V uniform or making a fake delivery of mice to the V kitchen. Mike Donovon is in the V HQ so frequently that he gets mail delivered there. This is not serious science fiction; this is a world where enemies fall down with one punch, and stealing and flying a spaceship requires zero training -- a true pulp fantasy.
I give credit to the actors for playing their parts with what comes across as a true delight. Marc (Beastmaster) Singer is the ostensible star Resistance fighter Mike Donovon, Faye (my 1985 Girlfriend) Grant is Juliet Parrish, the leader of the Resistance, and the cult-TV stalwart plays my very favorite character, Ham Tyler. Ham Tyler is the Vietnam vet badass, the mean, grumbly Batman of the show. When an army of Resistance fighters carefully disables the security system of a Visitor stronghold, sneaks in past laser mines and alien monster dogs, Ham is the character they find sitting on top of fifty dead aliens that he strangled with one of his eyelashes while he smoked a cigar and watched Sportscenter. One time, he ran out of cigarettes, and killed 40,000 aliens with a pair of salad tongs just because he was having a nicotine fit. The actors play it straight, and the character arcs are truly what holds the show together. So much of it is silly, but the characters themselves are pretty well fleshed out despite the fact that there're, like, eight-hundred of them. They grow and change in mostly real ways, and have the same kind of conflicts that one can imagine might occur in these situations. How that works amidst pinging laser guns and poorly blue-screened explosions is beyond me, but I think it does.
I find the series immensely entertaining. I love the way that the series becomes a sci-fi Casablanca, with L.A. becoming that last free city, and Elias' restaurant looks a whole lot like Rick's Cafe. (They even have the scene where the aliens start playing their national anthem in the cafe, and Faye Grant gets everyone to sing the American National Anthem louder in defiance.) I loved the love triangle between Robin, her fast-aging hybrid daughter Elizabeth, and Kyle, the young stud rebel. I love Diana's growing, sparkly hair, and the way that she's such a complete, scenery-chewing bitch. I love the bizarre, pointy-shouldered outfits that get more and more bizarre as the series continues, even throwing in leopard-print-wearing alien dignitaries, and the commanders whose necks are strung with bling gold chains. I loved the absolutely terrible alien baby puppet, and every sequence in the V Conversion Chamber. I haven't even finished watching all of these, but when I do, I know that I'll eventually watch them all again.
If you can put aside that need for serious and really thoughtful science fiction, and can really get into the two-fisted spirit of pulp novels, give these a shot. You'll learn that fisticuffs can save the world, the cavalry always arrives right before your laser gun runs out of ammo, and true love can blossom amidst an alien invasion. And what's more fun than a world like that?
ARE YOU ASTONISHED?
"V" began with Kenneth Johnson's idea of telling the story of the French Resistance to the Nazi campaign during World War II. Network execs, still flabbergasted at the continuing success of stuff like "Star Wars," suggested to Johnson that maybe the Nazis...could be aliens instead. At least this is what I read when I troll websites all night long, but the original miniseries has Johnson commentary, so you can listen to him talk about it. At any rate, the French Resistance became the Human Resistance, and the Nazis became Reptilian Aliens that wore outfits that looked like Nazi uniforms and had a big swastika-ish design as their logo. In fact, the first half of the original miniseries is so completely taken with the allegory that it's almost as if the script is reaching through your TV screen and occupying your living room in the name of Der Fuhrer. The fact that just one of the characters (Leonardo Cimino) realizes that the aliens are awfully similar to Hitler's army is a little bit improbable, but since it's the same actor that played the Scary German Guy from "The Monster Squad," I let it slide.
Once the allegory initial thickness wears down, the real "V" comes out. I understand that the original intent was to have the allegory be the grounding of the show, but the budget, the cheap effects, the costumes, and the entire 1983 style relegate the show to the status of an updated Flash Gordon serial. It's really hard to take it seriously, as a viewer in 2004, when aliens wearing pointy-shouldered leotards shoot shoddily-animated laser blasts at the Tight-Blue-Jean Resistance that reacts to things that happen off-screen a lot. The real show is the soap opera, a grand and silly drama that plays out like a cross between Buck Rogers and Guiding Light. The "Final Battle" and "The Series" are wonderful fun, and are completely engrossing if you look past their quite obvious shortcomings.
The Visitors, as the aliens are called, come to earth in giant motherships that hover over major cities; keep in mind that this show pre-dates "Independence Day" by over a decade. They eventually send an envoy to speak with the people of the world: all they want is some of our water resources, in exchange for their superior technology and science. Sure, we say! Before you know it, things are getting out of hand: scientists are disappearing, children are turning into V-Youth, and eventually martial law is declared across the world, with the Visitors holding the reigns. Then, voila, one of them gets their face ripped off. EGADS! A reptile! Turns out, they're just here to harvest humans for munchies, and maybe catch some sun on a nice warm rock if they've got the time. Thus, Mike Donovon, Juliet Parrish, Ham Tyler, and bucketloads of characters -- these suckers have a lot of main characters, nineteen off the top of my head -- decide to take back the earth. Silliness and action ensue! Drama! Romance! Laserguns! Reptiles! Red Dust! Action! Action! Action!
Most of the main cast returned to work in the weekly series, and it was noted as being a pretty terrible show. The scripts are pretty dodgy, the effects range from mediocre to "Man, I could do that on my iMac," and the plot holes are large enough to fly a mothership through. We're talking the kind of show where the Resistance leaders sneak into the V Headquarters in just about every episode simply by donning a V uniform or making a fake delivery of mice to the V kitchen. Mike Donovon is in the V HQ so frequently that he gets mail delivered there. This is not serious science fiction; this is a world where enemies fall down with one punch, and stealing and flying a spaceship requires zero training -- a true pulp fantasy.
I give credit to the actors for playing their parts with what comes across as a true delight. Marc (Beastmaster) Singer is the ostensible star Resistance fighter Mike Donovon, Faye (my 1985 Girlfriend) Grant is Juliet Parrish, the leader of the Resistance, and the cult-TV stalwart plays my very favorite character, Ham Tyler. Ham Tyler is the Vietnam vet badass, the mean, grumbly Batman of the show. When an army of Resistance fighters carefully disables the security system of a Visitor stronghold, sneaks in past laser mines and alien monster dogs, Ham is the character they find sitting on top of fifty dead aliens that he strangled with one of his eyelashes while he smoked a cigar and watched Sportscenter. One time, he ran out of cigarettes, and killed 40,000 aliens with a pair of salad tongs just because he was having a nicotine fit. The actors play it straight, and the character arcs are truly what holds the show together. So much of it is silly, but the characters themselves are pretty well fleshed out despite the fact that there're, like, eight-hundred of them. They grow and change in mostly real ways, and have the same kind of conflicts that one can imagine might occur in these situations. How that works amidst pinging laser guns and poorly blue-screened explosions is beyond me, but I think it does.
I find the series immensely entertaining. I love the way that the series becomes a sci-fi Casablanca, with L.A. becoming that last free city, and Elias' restaurant looks a whole lot like Rick's Cafe. (They even have the scene where the aliens start playing their national anthem in the cafe, and Faye Grant gets everyone to sing the American National Anthem louder in defiance.) I loved the love triangle between Robin, her fast-aging hybrid daughter Elizabeth, and Kyle, the young stud rebel. I love Diana's growing, sparkly hair, and the way that she's such a complete, scenery-chewing bitch. I love the bizarre, pointy-shouldered outfits that get more and more bizarre as the series continues, even throwing in leopard-print-wearing alien dignitaries, and the commanders whose necks are strung with bling gold chains. I loved the absolutely terrible alien baby puppet, and every sequence in the V Conversion Chamber. I haven't even finished watching all of these, but when I do, I know that I'll eventually watch them all again.
If you can put aside that need for serious and really thoughtful science fiction, and can really get into the two-fisted spirit of pulp novels, give these a shot. You'll learn that fisticuffs can save the world, the cavalry always arrives right before your laser gun runs out of ammo, and true love can blossom amidst an alien invasion. And what's more fun than a world like that?
ARE YOU ASTONISHED?
- I submit that Faye Grant is the most beautiful actress in the whole world.
- Despite the wide availability of easy-to-steal V spaceship/hovercrafts, Mike Donovon always seems to be riding around on a horse for no reason other than the fact that Marc Singer probably likes horses enough to have them written into the scripts.
- I guess this show is proof that Robert Englund can act as a character other than Freddy Krueger. I hope he ends up being remembered for a different role than either a child-murderer or a moron alien, despite the fact that he did those well.
- This show actually has "Science Fiction Consultants." I bet they're the guys that veto any science that's plausible.
sent by The Retropolitan at 10:19 AM
...1 RESPONDO-GRAMS:
Kenneth Johnson produced "V" shortly after working with the late Producer Phil DeGuerre who was developing the Arthur C. Clarke Classic "Childhood's End" from which he stole the "giant spaceship hovering over Earth cities" concept thus sabotaging the chances of Clarke's story being filmed to the present day. It was stolen a second time by Roland Emmerich for "Independence Day"
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