Shuttle Pilot
Join Date: Aug 2005
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Scathing review new SG-U GINO clone that no one cares to watch...
...and it's not kind...
Quote:
TV Review: Stargate: Universe
By Paula R. Stiles
[spoilers for the Pilot]
Tagline: A sudden attack on a geologically-fragile planet in the middle of a diplomatic tour from Earth forces a motley group through a stargate to a derelict ship, the Destiny, billions of light years away.
Review: Stargate: Universe starts out, somewhat promisingly, with a bunch of people being spit through a stargate into what looks like the dark cargo hold of a ship. They immediately find out that the life support on said ship is failing and they must fix it immediately or die. (For those of you who are newbies to the Stargate franchise, a stargate is a gate that leads to a wormhole and allows people to travel millions of light years in a few seconds.) Before they can really get their bearings, though, something happens. Unfortunately, that something is a flashback to the past back on Earth of one of the least interesting characters in the show, pudgy gamer-geek, Eli Wallace (David Blue).
Nor is that the last flashback. Most of the first hour feels like a string of flashbacks. Not necessarily a bad thing, except that the show is trying to establish this dark, claustrophobic vibe of people trapped in a horrible situation. How can you do that when you keep opening up the atmosphere by flashing back to the comforts of Earth? Someone on the IMDB boards compared this technique to the flashbacks on Lost. Yes, and thats one major reason why I dont watch Lost. No sooner do you start to get into the mysteries of the Island, but suddenly, youre whisked back into the mundanities of someones previous life, which really have jack to do with whatever mystery theyre handling on the Island. You also saw a lot of this on Battlestar Galactica. BSG had moments, episodes even, of dark greatness. But it did often sabotage itself with boring flashbacks that exposed the unimaginative, 21st-century view of culture back home in the Colonies and the shows only-partly-successful catering to people who hate SF. Why you would make an SF show for people who hate science fiction is beyond me,but then, Im just a humble specfic writer who doesnt work in Hollywood. I write for people who like the stories Im giving them.
Sensawunda. Thats what Stargate: Universe lacks. The people in the cargo hold have escaped a planetwide disaster after a major attack. They were hoping to get back home from said planet, but the seismic instabilities of the planet made this too dangerous for Earth at least, according to lead scientist Dr. Nicholas Rush (Robert Carlyle) so Rush dialed them someplace else, instead, someplace random. This someplace random turns out to be an automated ship of exploration, created by the Ancients, the same race that had also created the stargate system. The ship (unsubtly called the Destiny) is so old that its leaking air. So, youd think their first priority (as Rush points out) would be plugging the leak(s) and getting life support systems back up. But no. Apparently, their first priority is to lynch Rush for not sending them back to their comfortable lives on Earth (the concern that they might have blown Earth up in the process of dialing home bothers them not a jot), stamp their feet and demand he do it right this time. With a stargate that doesnt work, on a ship thats leaking air. And the ship isnt even interesting to look at it because nobody involved with the show bothered to come up with a credibly alien-looking design like the Egyptian-inspired settings of the original Stargate series. Which leaves us stuck with the unpleasant characters.
This is another big problem with the show. Most of the people on the ship are unsympathetic, consisting of a witchs brew of whinging, entitled bureaucrats and stereotypically bone-headed military cannon fodder who make little impression in the Pilot (including the alleged fair-haired leader Everett Young, played by Justin Louis). Its a sad situation when I find myself mourning the end of ever-sultry Vancouver actress Ona Grauers five minutes of showtime in a flashback I didnt even like. Carlyle easily makes the dodgy Rush the most sympathetic and heroic of the characters, mainly because Rush is the only one trying to take care of business and keep people alive. Doesnt help, therefore, that Rush is treated like the Zachary Smith of the show by both characters and writers.
Lt. Tamara Johansen (Alaina Huffman) is pleasant (if bland), but utterly fails to do the kind of proper triage a field medic like her should know in her sleep. Apparently, the character was originally supposed to be Asian and is now a blonde Nordic-type. We absolutely needed more of those in television SF. Lou Diamond Philips isnt in enough of the two-hour pilot to register much. Blue plays Wallace as whiny, lazy and stupid (no, I dont care what his background infodump says about his being a mathematical genius). Bureaucrat Camile Wray (Ming-Na) stands out largely for acting like a complete nitwit who keeps getting in the way of the lifesaving efforts with a totally misplaced sense of self-importance. Its regrettable, therefore, that she is also the token Asian and lesbian character on the show.
Senator Armstrong (Chris MacDonald) manages to be a blowhard even while dying of blood loss and leaves the show in an improbable and unnecessary act of heroism. His daughter, Chloe (Elyse Levesque), is the most annoying of an exasperating group. I dearly wanted to see her punched in the face and shoved out an airlock. Alas, shes going to be a regular. Of course she is. SyFy must have some kind of clause in its contracts these days that all of its series and films must have at least one obnoxious teenage or young adult character. Stargate: Universe does it one better and gives us two.
Now, come on. If youre going to have such a bleak situation, surely youre going to make your characters as sympathetic as possible so that well want to be in that bleak situation with them, fighting along. No? Well
****. But honestly? This show isnt very dark. The early previews did a good job of masking this. But the more recent previews, with scenes of female characters skinnydipping in pretty British Columbian sorry, alien planet pools, let the cat out of the bag. This is the same formula Battlestar Galactica (new and old version) and Star Trek: Voyager ripped off from Lost in Space. Stargate: Universe boasts of killing off three major characters in the two-hour premiere. I dont see how you can call such characters major when we barely meet them before they snuff it and I dont even remember two of them, but okay. But didnt Voyager kill off an entire ships sickbay of personnel in its pilot? Id reckon there were a lot more than three people in there. And nothing quite beats the near-clean sweep of humanity that BSG does. Ill grant you that I might be influenced by reviewing for a Lovecraftian zine like Innsmouth Free Press, but then, I also have personal high (or is that low?) standards for dark in a show. Stargate: Universe doesnt even come close to meeting them. Dim lighting; eye-straining jittery camerawork; unlikeable characters and a grotty, unnecessary sex scene do not a dark show make. An annoying show is what they make.
Which brings us back to the sensawunda, or lack thereof. When the first series, Stargate SG1, debued on Showtime back in 97, I started watching it more for completeness sake than anything else. At that time, I made a point of watching every SF series I could because there really werent that many. I hadnt been all that impressed by the movie and the plots in season one were very stock, with problems introduced and neatly wrapped up all in 45 minutes.
But there were two things about Stargate SG1 (both of which Stargate: Universe lacks) that I found charming and, in some ways, new. One was the way they presented the worlds the team visited. SG1 was one of the first SF series to film in British Columbia and present it as a wide variety of alien worlds. Before that, with the various Star Trek series, etc., we were stuck with blah desert settings, urban landcapes and Planet Hells. One of the draws of fantasy shows like Hercules, Xena and Highlander was that they werent filmed around Los Angeles. The first two were filmed in New Zealand and Highlander was filmed in Paris and Vancouver. This freshness of location gave these series an exoticism that genre series of the time lacked. SG1 also traded in that exoticism, two years before Australian-filmed Farscape came along.
The second thing I liked about SG1 was that the characters were fun and likeable and made up a good team. It was so nice, after years of ****** bozos in shows like The X-Files, to get military people like ONeill and Carter who were calm, polite, moral, good in emergencies you know, real. Daniel Jackson was an academic geek, but he was a cute geek who carried his own weight and fit in fairly quickly with the team. Fourth team member, Tealc the Jafa, managed to keep his alien mystery for years, despite being (biologically) human. Special kudos to Chris Judge for creating a character so unlike himself. All of this showed up as early as the Pilot (which SyFy rebroadcast a few days ago). And while the writing for the second series, Stargate: Atlantis, never produced what youd call brilliant television, Atlantis did boast some interesting characters (even if they werent the leads) and a truly beautiful city set in the middle of an ocean. Sensawunda cubed.
Stargate: Universe has none of this. Though the ship is very pretty in a Lexx sort of way on the outside, the inside of the Ancient vessel looks too human in manufacture to be exotic and is ugly as all get-out, to boot. Enjoy exploring that? Dont think so. The previews weve seen of the places these people will be exploring (in between plotting against each other and stabbing each other in the back, no doubt) look equally dull. The characters are difficult to care about or root for. All of this seems to tie in with the general (and recent) trend to write SF shows for people who hate SF. Ive always thought this was a stupid idea, but lets face it: Hollywoods not a cup that runneth over with good sense, tact, or respect for genre or source material. My heart bleeds for Robert Carlyle, whos doing his manful, Glaswegian best to keep this sinking Titanic afloat, and you know, the show might well go on for quite a while. The Stargate franchise is still healthy enough to make even a piece of mopey crud viable for a season or two. But as far as being a good show, this ship looks to be dead on arrival.
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