New JJ Abrams show. First impressions: it seems like it could have some promise, but at points it smacks of the same cliche, cheesy script that plagued Terra Nova. Couple other things: Spoiler The pacing is shit. Why introduce us to the "protagonist" only to waste him within 10 minutes? It would be fine to do that with most characters, but in a series pilot it's just way too jarring. Also, why is their trip being given the Lord of the Rings treatment with apparently random time periods passing in a matter of seconds just to make them move further from plot point to plot point? I almost guarantee the mother isn't dead and reappears at a later point within the show. Abrams didn't cast Juliette from Lost just to show up on screen for 60 seconds and be gone. Why would they introduce this Nate guy for a matter of seconds and then have him follow them along for fuck knows how long and wind up wasting some potential rapists? Then minutes later have him be a bad guy? Then a good guy again? What in the fuck? Gus Fring too? Fuck yeah. Aside from the Morpheus sunglasses, I'm eager to see what they plan for him. I like the way they tied this random Monroe guy to the beginning of the episode. Makes sense I guess. The whole series is based around no electricity, but in the first episode we find out that that's not exactly true? Ok, cool. Well, despite my seemingly-aggressive dislike for the pilot, I still think the show has some promise. I'm going to tell myself that all the shit I mentioned there is the writers getting the pieces in place for the story they eventually intend to tell, even though they legitimately could have turned most of that information into a full season of suspense. I might just be used to the Lost style of story progression (translation: a pace that can best be described as 'glacial'), and with that in mind, I'll still try to keep an open mind about this series since I am one of the biggest JJ Abrams fanboys out there. Also, maybe me reading too deeply into this: I wonder if there is anything at all to be said about how the title sequence only features the word "evolution" before the 'R' appears.
Abrams is an exec producer. Eric Kripke (Supernatural) is the creator and writer. I like the premise and approach. Hopefully it'll find and keep an audience.
What happened to all the guns and bullets in the US? It can't have been that long ago that whatever happened, happened, but they're using crossbows?
They kind of touched on that. They said that firearms were illegal now (and owning them punishable by death), so I'm sure a lot of them were rounded up and destroyed. The only ones that are out there now are controlled by the militias or being hidden by people. Plus, I'm sure they went through a ton of shit in the wars that started after. That's the only explanation I can come up with.
A few quick thoughts on the pilot: - The world doesn't look right, it feels forced and fake. Supposedly, they've been on the road for weeks, but their hair is perfect; everyone is clean; their clothes are immaculate and ironed; the hotel staircase where the swordfight takes place doesn't have a speck of dirt anywhere; books in the background look like they just came off the shelf at Barnes and Noble; horses are professionally groomed; glass is crystal clear (I guess Windex, Dawn, clean water, and paper towels survived in mass quantities). - Speaking of which, the costumes also suck. Nothing they wear is set up in any functional pattern. The main girl is wearing boots that would be awful to walk long distances in (and look like they are from Pirates of the Caribbean, not a post-apocalyptic show). How does the group carry their water and basic supplies? Why does the fat guy haul a huge backpack but nobody else thought to bring one? - Why are they paranoid enough to carry poison but have the situational awareness of a fucking rock when making camp for the night? Nobody posts watch? - Why is almost every weapon - from the knives on their belt to the muskets - from the 18th Century? Did all the K-bars, Swiss Army knives, and Benchmade's disappear when the power went out? Why muskets? Modern weapons with iron sights don't require electricity and ammo is plentiful. You'd think the local warlord would outfit his guys with better shit. Saying "the world ran out of bullets" or something is bullshit. Most serious gun owners buy in bulk and have a metric fuckton of ammo laying around. That shit kinda builds up over the years. I have over 20,000 rounds of assorted rifle and pistol ammo in my safe right now - that's more than enough to outfit a small band of people for 15+ years, assuming you don't go looking for a fight. I'm sure the weirdos on "Doomsday Preppers" have much more than that, not to mention the forklift pallets full of ammo stored by most police departments or huge military depots. - When the fuck did everyone 1.) get swords and 2.) learn to swordfight like the Three Musketeers? The lack of attention to detail is stunning. Any of these things individually would be overlooked, but they compound on one another and ruin any suspension of disbelief. The producers, writers, directors, and everyone else behind the camera wasted a really good premise by not thinking things through. There's a lot of cool shit to explore in the world of Revolution if they had done just that: set up a believable world for the story to take place in. I kinda get it: they want a medieval sword-fighting, swashbuckling, cowboy adventure meets Mad Max. However, they failed to ask basic functional questions about how their world works, so unconvincing sets end up looking like an elaborate game of pretend.
And another thing: Yeah, yeah, I get it. All of the power went out. But you can't tell me there's not one fucking electrical engineer or tinkerer in the whole goddamn country that couldn't jimmy rig a battery, generator, or car. Get the fuck out of here. And I agree with the dread pirate. If they've got black powder and ball ammo for the muskets, they can make modern cartridges to fire. Making your own ammo isn't hard, and to think that no one saved any of their casings is fucking ridiculous. I can suspend disbelief to a point, but the people who made this show are asking me to forget way too much to make their little story work.
This is the biggest problem I have with these types of shows: that when the catastrophe happens everyone just kind of accepts it and people don't make any real effort to fix it. Because it's like you said, if all of the power actually did go out pretty much everyone (as a collective society) would be putting all their effort into figuring out how to get the power back the fuck on.
OH MY GOD THIS TV SHOW ISN'T BEING REALISTIC AT ALLL!!!1!1!!! Calm down. I agree, the pilot wasn't great. But it's JJ, so I'll give it a couple eps. Favreau as well, so add one to that. Gus Fring gets to talk more often and be more of an overt badass, so add a couple more. If Liz Mitchell ends up not having died (and really, why would they cast her for like, three lines at the beginning of the pilot) then I'll probably watch the whole first season.
To quote some pretty well informed guys on Lightfighter: Basically, the writers never did their research and it shows.
I actually wanted to throw that in my list of things that bugged me, but figured my firearm knowledge wasn't up to par...why are they using muskets? As I said, I just assumed there was some blatantly obvious firearms knowledge that I lacked that would explain why they couldn't use modern weapons and were relegated to fucking muskets. Oh well - like iczorro and I both said - since Abrams' name is attached to this show, I'll be giving it a lot of time to really get started. I'm willing to suspend disbelief about things like costumes and choice of weapons, but I can't stand the pacing and editing. The premise is very, very interesting to me, as are some of the story arcs they apparently set up, but I hope they just moved the pieces into place in the first episode and things get a bit more tightly written from here on out.
Iczorro, it's getting harder to justify this shit...they are throwing out literally every contrived plot device possible. As I said, the actual idea behind the show seems quite interesting to me, but it's being executed worse than Terra Nova. I'll still stick around for the next episode, but this is actually laughably bad at this point.
The beginning of the pilot sort of touched on that. From what I gathered, even if they try, it won't work. They just can't use power (which must really suck for the whole "using brains" thing). Given that we don't know what's exactly going on with electricity and how exactly "physics went insane", I can let that go. That said, combustion works just fine. Modern cars will have trouble without electricity, sure, but why is there still no land transportation after 15 years? Why get a bunch of dudes to lug around a chopper on some rolling logs, instead of using a (steam?) engine, for example?
It is called sloppy and poorly written drivel. The same reason they had a fire smoldering the morning after barely escaping with their lives and being a heavily wanted group on the run. Or why a battle hardened marine living in an anarchist society being hunted by the militia listened to his cow-eyed niece he barely knows and didn't kill the lone bounty hunter who escaped his prison and made it to town not only before them, but with enough time to set a trap and gather more evil henchman which were quickly dispatched in a 5v1 battle to the death. They can maintain or manufacture compound bows but somehow arms cartridges, which can easily be made by hand escape them? The important woman with the working technology obviously recognizes the knock at the door (big secret JJ Abrams reveal later) with abject terror then runs off to warn the group letting them know whom it is and just by a name denotes the connotation of what will happen to her? W.T.F. Look at all the plot/common sense holes there. (Hey this guy in our secret organization is now hunting us down and doing terrible things to us and obviously knows where I am, but I'm surprised when he shows up?) WHY AM I STILL HERE? JJ Abrams, no more shows for you. Like several other people have said, America and technology existed without electricity for centuries. It's not like it was that difficult or impossible to go back.
(R)evoluti@n, or What Happens After Snake Plisskin Shuts Down The Grid In That L.A. Movie starring (fake) Katniss and Peta!!! This is as much a letdown as HEROES was; a real chance at telling a serious and compelling story, ruined by the need to appease primetime TV audiences. I mean at this point you can tell it's gonna be yet another crappy network show just from watching any random 5 minutes of it. What really gets me, plot holes and acting aside, is that idiot ex-Google sidekick. After 15 years of hard-scrabble agrarian society, by what right is this motherfucker so "well fed"? Oh right, this is for the lowest-common, so *of course* the Computer Guy has to look like he just crawled out of his mom's fully-stocked basement. Nevermind the physical labor that comes from planting crops by hand for 15 seasons, the audience gets what they expect and no more. I do wish they respected our intelligence a bit more. Then again, the way we hung in for 6 years of LOST's real-time scriptwriting, fuck it why should they?
I've "discovered" some great TV shows thanks to the folks on this board, so I'd like to thank you all for validating the impressions I had of this show simply from watching the trailers/commercials. Many of the issues you folks bring up are due to shitty writing, directing and producing. Nobody looked at this whole weapons thing and thought it was ridiculous? Swords? Really? How much work would it really have been to take this great concept and make it even marginally realistic? I won't be watching this show. Thanks everyone.
Spoiler Welp, Jacob and Gus Fring are now on the same team, so I'm committed for the first season at least. That aside, here is how I can describe the show to anyone that has seen Lost but hasn't started this: take a somewhat more mild dose of the mystery and intrigue, but make the entire journey from plot point to plot point as painful as possible. The only semi-interesting characters are Fring, Jeremy (and even then, only by virtue of being Jacob from Lost) and Myles. The only reason Myles is even interesting now is because of his backstory - his scenes are like a D-level action hero trying to be badass and funny at the same time, with predictable results: both suck. Charlie sucks. The Google guy sucks. The step-mom or whatever seems like she knows more than she lets on too, but also kind of sucks. It's like someone said "wow, I have the best idea for a TV show ever" but they've never actually watched one. They know an interesting story when they hear one, but can't actually present it worth shit.
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-10-dumbest-things-tv-so-far-this-season/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-10-dumb ... is-season/</a>