By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
I watched the premier of Revolution on NBC last night. What a huge disappointment – although I should have known better. I don’t know whether to laugh, cry or just get angry, or all of the above.
The premise of the series is an EMP taking out electricity planet wide. Let’s forget for a minute, that that would never happen. Even a solar flare wouldn’t take it out planet wide. Okay, I’ll suspend that piece of logic for a moment. The way the show depicts the lights going out is laughable. You see a long row of car lights going out one at a time in a row. Hello? They would all go out at once. They showed planes crashing with the lights still on. Geez… All done for effect, just figuring everyone is stupid enough to swallow it. They stole parts of other story lines from Jericho, Jeremiah, Falling Skies and The Postman. They just didn’t steal the good parts.
The plot takes off 15 years after everything goes down. But, 15 years later a Desert Eagle has plenty of ammo (rare even by today’s standards, much less 15 years after the world ends as we know it). People are remarkably clean in relatively nice clothing. Their hair is perfect and things look really civilized after a mass die-off. I can’t take it. There is no reality here, no real meat to concoct this scenario. Just a young, good-looking teenage girl with a low cut t-shirt and a sloppy storyline. Oh, and there is the Google millionaire that is of course a good guy geek. I seriously doubt there would be very many people that are overweight 15 years after a collapse. Just sayin’.
But the very best part hit me this morning… Something bugged me about the opening and I realized what it was this morning. Yep, the opening is the Communist mantra: evolution not revolution. You see the word ‘evolution’ change to ‘revolution.’ Can you believe it? So in one lousy show, you have the green movement (which is the new red) showing how we should go back to living off the land and you have the Communists pushing their agenda. Well done NBC. Your red diaper is showing. Propagandic lame entertainment for the masses.
New TV Show: Revolution — Phoning It In
By: Citizen Scribe
I have a soft spot for post-apocalyptic cinema. “Cinema” here includes “made-for-TV” and is represented by such favorites as Mad Max, Waterworld, The Postman, I Am Legend, Earth Abides (please make the movie), The Stand, Hunger Games, and so on.
I will pretty much engage on at least the first few episodes of anything that fits the genre, like Jeremiah, Jericho, Falling Skies, and stuff like that.
And now also Revolution.
We watched the premier last night. About fifteen minutes in, I found myself hollering at the TV. The inconsistencies and failed plausibilities are just epic.
Slate has their own complaint, of course.
My own list of gripes didn’t even include the hair.
Bad science. The wave front for an EMP — or anything that produces that same effect — does not travel at sub-sonic speeds, even if the “electric dominoes” effect does look cool. The cars lined up on the highway would not “blink out” one at a time. Planes falling out of the sky would a) not fall with their freaking lights still flashing (I mean, REALLY?), b) not fall straight down while vaguely spinning like an auto-rotating ‘copter. Cell phones would not “flicker” out of service. Oh, and just to be mean, asthma inhalers would not still be pressurized after fifteen frigging years.
Clothing. It’s been fifteen frigging years with no electric power and people are still wearing synthetic fabrics that look like they’ve just come off the rack?
Weapons. Okay, yeah, knives, swords, bows & arrows, black powder muskets, stuff like that. But a mini-crossbow for close engagement? You couldn’t do a nice short recurve? The lead bad guy carries a Desert Eagle? You couldn’t give him something with dirt-common ammunition? Had to pick something that shoots a round (.50 AE) which — after fifteen frigging years — is going to be hen’s-teeth-scarce? Why not something in a 1911? Hell, a Beretta even?
Character character. Yes, the character of the characters. It’s been fifteen frigging years of off-grid living, and your two adult children still behave like emo-kids?
Plausibility lapses. It’s been fifteen frigging years and somehow the dude the with magic digital talisman has never formulated a fall-back plan, has never briefed his kids on the importance of preserving this thing, hands it over to a used-to-be Google geek without any kind of orientation (although the gratuitous geekness will surely figure in this narrative later), and can’t manage to keep his adult son (see emo-kids above) from losing it and precipitating the (plot-enabling) catastrophe that launches the odyssey.
And the “teaser” scene at the end (lifted from Jericho) pretty much guarantees that they will spend much narrative coin “explaining” the global failure of electricity (“physics just went nuts”), and how electric power is really still there but is “suppressed” by some mad-scientist “field” which is abridged somehow by the “magic digital talisman” (alternatively, the talisman “emits” electricity, which would be even worse). And, of course, the “event” (evidently human caused) which killed electricity will also have to “expositioned” in dialog later on, providing lots of filler for plot padding.
The show has potential, and there’s plenty of room for the writers to repair things, but lately I get the sense that “writers” are just phoning it in. My wife and I identified at least three other shows from which they ripped off plot-enabling devices and we see very little that’s actually new.
That said, we’re probably gonna watch the next couple of episodes anyway.
Because it’s better than whatever’s on the news.
~~ CS
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