The main problem is that I didn't care for the "documentary style" it used. Maybe some people like it, and the producers clearly must have or they wouldn't have used it, but I found the endless weaving and wobbling of the camera to be annoying, distracting, and ultimately productive of a mild case of motion sickness. The bigwigs who developed the show will probably argue that the erratic, restless camera is somehow "realistic". But when I view the world through my own eyes, I don't see it wobbling and shaking; it seems very solid and stable no matter how my head moves. So I don't think it's realistic at all; I just think it's a distracting artistic fetish, and it made me want to reach for some of my leftover anti-nausea medications.
The second problem was that the one episode I managed to watch before I got kind of queasy and had to turn it off was dumb. You're on a ship fleeing an attack by the Cylons. You're in the middle of a war for your very survival against an implacable foe that will stop at nothing to see you dead. You're in a ship that's been around for a good long while. So when all the water tanks on your port side blow out and vent said water, what's your first supposition? Sabotage? Enemy action? No - you conclude that the tanks, which have been utterly reliable till now, were "structurally weak" (as opposed to "morally weak", I guess) and simply failed simultaneously.
And then there was some space battle, with Colonial Vipers and Cylon fighters zipping around doing heaven knows what. I couldn't tell, because the camera moves in the special effects shots were, if anything, even more wild than during the tepid staff meetings. Maybe the producers were trying to give us a sense of the confusion and chaos of battle. Or maybe their digital effects weren't great and by confusing and confounding us with wild and erratic camera moves, they didn't have to spend so much money on detailing and texturing the models (digital or practical).
And I hate the helmets the human fighter pilots wear. Yeah, I know that you have to light the actors so the audience can see their faces, but every time they showed a human fighter pilot's face, I had the strange feeling that said fighter pilot had just awakened and was staring, bleary and half-asleep, into the flat white zombie-glow of a refrigerator. Very unappealing.
The bottom line: the story wasn't good enough to make me want to put up with the irritatingly unstable camera.
Done and done.
This isn't to say that the premise is bad. I just didn't care for the execution, and got so tired of IRRITATING camera I felt absolutely no desire to stick around long enough to give a shit about any of the characters or what happened to the humans in the end.
No comments:
Post a Comment