I really wanted to like the new version of “V,” which premiered last night. I really did.
I was a huge fan of the first mini-series and its sequel. I even read the books set in the world imagined by Kenneth Johnson. Yeah, it’s easy to look back on the cheesy effects now and scoff. But the power of the first scenes — giant spaceships floating over the major cities of Earth — is undiminished, even today. It’s why the image is still being used, from Independence Day to the current series.
Unfortunately, after those first scenes, the resemblance ends.
The new series has a better cast — I was watching mainly for Alan Tudyk, Elizabeth Mitchell and Morena Baccarin. And it has better effects. Better than the original series anyway. For a modern TV series, the SFX were fair to poor. In too many places, the producers were clearly forced to work on a budget. L.A. stands in for New York in some thoroughly unconvincing scenes. A fighter jet crashes on the street, leaving no debris or flames. They even skimped on the number of extras — it looks like maybe a couple dozen people gather to watch the skies when the spacecraft arrive. And when we finally get the space lizards, they don’t even have ray-guns. They use knives. Knives. Yeah, I think humanity came up with those about 10,000 B.C.
But the real problems start when those talented actors have to grapple with the truly insipid dialogue and nonsensical plot points they’ve been supplied by the script. Mitchell and Tudyk, who are supposed to be hotshot FBI counterterrorism agents, use satellite imagery to figure out that a truck was parked by a shed. They enter like they’re looking for gardening tools rather than C-4, and they throw switches and stomp down stairs as if they’ve never heard of a booby-trap. Then they conveniently find a dead body left in a pile of clues, and they still have no idea what to do.
Another character, played by Morris Chestnut, deals with his girlfriend’s questions about mysterious cell phone questions by telling her it’s nothing. He says it twice, so that explains everything. Mitchell’s heart-to-heart with her son is equally painful (and recycles some of the same lines). It would be hard for anyone to make these scenes work — the viewers are supposed to care about family drama when there are giant UFOs driven by space lizards in the sky? — but the dialogue is so flat, it’s like the writers are just marking pages until we get to the good stuff.
Baccarin and Scott Wolf have better stuff to work with, and there’s actual playfulness and tension in their scenes. But their scenes are about as subtle as blunt instruments. Baccarin, as Anna, tells Wolf she doesn’t want any “negative” questions. Given that most people know that most reporters really don’t like asking hard questions — it’s both surprising and sort of dumb when Wolf tries to stand up for his journalistic ethics. It would have been more effective for Anna to tame him with a wink and a nod, rather than bluntly threatening to cancel the interview. What if she’d said, “No tough questions, of course. Or we’ll have you killed.” And then a pretty smile. He would have been so baffled, he wouldn’t have known what to do. In an earlier scene, when the barking dogs of the press confronted Anna — again, how likely does that seem? — she should have turned around and said, “Hey, anyone here who’s mastered faster-than-light travel, raise your hands? Anyone? No? Right, shut up then.”
The thing is, the Visitors are supposed to be a lot smarter than we are. They’ve been planning this attack on humanity for decades, in utmost secrecy, and then they park their ships over the capitals of the world. And they have deserters from this master plan who apparently think they can just wander off and marry the locals without ever worrying about what will happen next.
I’ve said this before, but the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten for this kind of story is: you get one free pass. The audience will believe that there are aliens, or monsters, or vampires, or super-heroes who can fly. But after that, everything has to be consistent and logical within the story that you have established. Once you use that free pass, you’re insulting the audience to ask them to ignore plot holes or wait until the next episode for you to address the obvious questions.
Who knows? A lot of people really seemed to like this version of “V.” And despite all my complaints, I want it to do well. (I’m always in favor of people getting a lot of money and praise for writing about aliens, monsters and world takeovers.) But given the twenty-six years since the original, I was really hoping we’d get something better.
