Various Thoughts

On a whim I decided to check out some of the many, many non-Anime TV shows I’ve been ignoring for the past 12 years or so (along with a few movies as well):

TV Shows

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. – Everyone’s far too smug.
• Almost Human – A very good buddy-cop action series. It’s practically criminal it only got one season.
• Alphas – Not bad; the pieces are all there… they just don’t cohere into something greater. It’s serviceable and no more.
• Andromeda – Eh. Everything about it screams low-budget.
• Caprica – I don’t know what I was expecting really, but it wasn’t this. It’s an odd collection of disparate elements that don’t really work on any level.
• Dark Angel – Deliberately avoided watching this in the past for no particular reason. Checked it out now and something about the atmosphere/tone/look doesn’t quite work for me.
• Defiance – Reminiscent of Farscape and surprisingly good. Both expansive and structurally coherent with an engaging cast of characters. The third season however goes too far off the rails.
• Falling Skies – Could do with less children and the protagonist’s constantly bemused expression is annoying. Those issues aside it doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be post-apocalyptic survival or hi-tech sci-fi.
• Nikita – Huh. I wasn’t really expecting anything from this reboot, but it seems to capture the mood and tone of the 1997 version rather well (based on my hazy recollections from that time).
• Sanctuary – Okayish. Kind of rough around the edges though and the episodic stories are all over the place… deliberately it seems.
• Sherlock – More like a collection of movies than a TV series/mini-series. While they’re a bit ambling and the lectures are kind of dry (and it becomes more and more unhinged as the seasons progress), there’s some good banter scattered about.
• Space: Above and Beyond – The sci-fi aspects here are almost incidental; a few visual tweaks and this would easily pass for a conventional war drama.
• Stargate Atlantis – I don’t like how a random pilot suddenly becomes the hotshot ranking officer protagonist with zero transition time. Other than that it’s perfectly watchable, if formulaic and overly episodic.
• Stitchers – Only took a look at this because I wanted to see what else the actress who played Claudia in Warehouse 13 was in. Curiously, it reminds me of a peppy Le Femme Nikita… which is surprisingly engaging.
• The 100 – Remarkably well made post-apocalyptic survival… assuming you don’t mind young protagonists.
• The Expanse – Pretty good. Reminiscent of Battlestar Galactica if that show happened to have police procedural elements.
• The Last Ship – Starts out surprisingly similar to Stargate Atlantis, just with stiffer character interactions and far more engaging storytelling. Unfortunately it deteriorates once the focus moves to the government, with events seeming to occur for the sole purpose of artificially dragging things out.
• The Magicians – Something’s off here. There’s a distinct air of contrivance, with events coming across as especially forced.
• Threshold – Feels staged; looks awful.
• Torchword – Doesn’t look professional in the slightest. It’s as though it were filmed in someone’s backyard with a camcorder.
• Warehouse 13 – Brings to mind a cross between Bones and Fringe. A nice mix of episodic stories, overarching plotlines, and character dynamics… though the dialog can be cringe-inducing at times.
• Z Nation – The camerawork is all over the place, which gives a distinctly amateurish impression.

Movies

• Autómata – Decent enough. Feels more like a TV miniseries than a movie though.
• Dredd – A solid, entertaining action movie.
• Green Lantern – There’s a lot going on here, most of it extraneous. The childhood flashback and related family drama along with the whole alien-autopsy subplot, for instance, could’ve been removed without losing anything. Aside from that the only notable aspect is the pretty great CGI.
• Rogue One – Better than The Force Awakens, but the characters just didn’t grab me.
• Sherlock Holmes – Good action scenes.
• Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows – More madcap than the prequel. Which is a positive.
• Star Wars: The Force Awakens – Average I guess? Neither the characters nor events are particularly interesting and it has the air of fanfiction.