"The Event" - It's the next 'Lost'!

I had to title it that because you know it's what they wanted to market it as, but after the abysmal failures of "The Nine" and "Flashforward," they didn't want to go that far. But the "Lost" vibe is what it's going for, and it's no surprise that it's no "Lost."
Take the crazy crisis situations, minority President and Jack Bauer tactics of "24," add in elements of the first, second, and fourth "Die Hard" movies, multiply it by "Lost" with all its vague mysteries, throw in a little "Independence Day" action hero and "need to know" dialogue, add a whole lot of "Flashforward"'s ambitions, and "Flashforward"'s, "The Nine"'s and "The 4400"'s emphasis on a big occurrence, and you've got NBC's "The Event." I was struggling to find something, anything, that was original or at least a fresh spin on tried and true elements of the mystery/SciFi genres, but I don't recall finding any. So many elements just felt lifted from other projects with recognized, recently free actors thrown in. The dialogue was nothing special and downright irritating in the scenes with the politicians, where they talked in broad, noble rhetoric without any real arguments on the situation they were discussing. No one character had any distinct personality which made it hard to care about any of them in particular. "Lost"'s main strength was their characters and I give them all due respect for creating realistic, distinctive, multi-dimensional, morally ambiguous characters.


I'm suspecting I've become jaded after being let down by "Heroes," "Flashforward," and "Lost." Again and again, I've learned that the payoff is hardly worth the investment so you have to be content with the journey. The problem is when you get shows like this that so emphasize the mystery primarily, (it's called "The Event" after all. And no matter what fans say, "Lost" was unique and lit up the fanbase because of its mysteries) you have to hope they have a good plan for the mystery and they aren't just stringing you along.

"Flashforward," "Lost," and it looks like "The Event" as well all had the same problem for me. I feel like they were terrified of outright embracing their SciFi side. Executives still think SciFi could never be mainstream, so I get this feeling that these shows skirt SciFi, insisting on bizarre mysteries to draw in viewers but not going deep enough into the SciFi realm to give satisfying payoff to their mysteries. Everything stays in this vague middle-ground where they try to please everyone.

Regarding the event itself, I hate the whole "too soon to reference real-life terrorism in pop culture" argument, but it still bothers me a little to see a hijacked plane getting flown into a building in a fictional setting. It wasn't fun watching Clark Kent burn down twin towers on "Smallville" and it wasn't fun watching a plane plummeting to the ground on "The Event." I guess using planes gives you an automatic, built-in anxiety about the situation due to real-life plane crashes/hijackings and fictional ones. Still, when you name a show "The Event," I expect a little something bigger than a strange occurrence during a plane hijacking. This just felt like an old episode of "The Twilight Zone." So did they go through a wormhole? Was is some weird, man-made technology like on "Flashforward?" Were they transported through time like in "The Twilight Zone" or "The 4400?" Is everyone on the plane dead and now in purgatory, getting prepped for their journey to heaven? (I couldn't resist.) Did they just get transported somewhere else on Earth? That seems unlikely since the plane still would have crashed, just somewhere else. All in all, I'm not so sure I care. Maybe they'll do something interesting with the concept, but I'm not holding out hope.

There were so many moments in the pilot that took me out of the show. As a frequent flyer who gained all her flight experience in the post 9/11 world, a lot of security issues took me out of the episode. How did Jason Ritter get a gun on the plane? I saw that he ditched some clothes or something in the bathroom after boarding the plane, but didn't notice what they were. If they were a uniform for airplane personnel, wouldn't the other airplane personnel have noticed him? And if it wasn't a uniform, then still how did he get the gun on the plane? How did that guy in the car just drive onto the tarmac? Why were there no people on the tarmac at all? I was incredibly relieved they didn't ignore the existence of Air Marshals, though, so they gained a couple points back for that.

Stray other thoughts:

• So I figure some conspiracy group took Scott Patterson aka Michael Buchanan's daughters hostage after shooting his wife, then forced him to crash the plane. That was quite an elaborate plan then since they bothered to disappear the older daughter, going so far as to take out her cell phone.


• Couldn't Jason Ritter have just asked the guard or the hotel manager to look at the security footage to show he and his girlfriend were there? The footage would probably be gone since the kidnappers went through so much trouble to make it look like they were never there, but it didn't even occur to Jason's character to try?


• "I'll explain everything once we're on the ground." You can't at least say something, like someone is hijacking the plane as the pilot? Or just something?


• I'll be honest, it took me some time to realize that the names before certain scenes were the characters' names, not the credits. I was thinking the credits were taking a long time to come up, but then I realized that I wasn't recognizing any of the names. Yes, it was a dumb moment.


• Once they're on the ground, "you can arrest me all you want." Lol.
  
  
• Why didn't ANYONE try to drive the President away from a plane rushing towards him? Where was his Secret Service detail? He was already in the car with his family, and they all just sat there.


• That whole post-drowning scene where the couples are hanging out and drinking felt exactly like the setup for a horror movie. The young lovers on vacation, the exotic locale, the mysterious strangers forcing their way into your life, the odd way they met...


• Without distinctive characters, I still have to resort to saying "hey, now we're talking with Dr Kerry Weaver, and now we're talking with Luke Danes, and now we're talking to that "Joan of Arcadia" guy, and is Zeljko Ivanek on every single damn show?"
  

I'll tune in for the next few episodes. If it's going somewhere interesting or there's actually some character development, I'll stick with it. If the dialogue and cast are still bland as all get-out and they drag out the mystery forever like it's the most fascinating question to plague mankind, I'll drop it.

Movie Night: "Live Free or Die Hard"

I managed to work in a movie night yesterday and I am so happy I did. Thanks to FX and theirs DVD on TV specials, I saw my first movie in the "Die Hard" franchise. I know, I should be very ashamed for never having seen any of these movies and I really am. They sound like movies I would love, especially if they're anything like the fourth installment. I feel bad, not being able to compare and contrast the films, but I imagine having a newbie's impression would be good in some ways. For one, I'm sure every film critic out there compared this film against the previous ones. Also, as a first-time viewer and not a diehard fan of the franchise (I couldn't resist), I can give an honest and unbiased opinion on the fourth film. "Live Free or Die Hard" is all about John McClane, aka the original Jack Bauer, fighting cyber-terrorists. You've got Timothy Olyphant as the big bad head terrorist and computer genius, Justin Long as a hacker hunted by the terrorists' assassins, Bruce Willis as a badass saving pretty much everyone, Kevin Smith as another hacker genius, and Maggie Q as another cyber-terrorist. The terrorists are basically shutting down every part of the nation's infrastructure run by a computer, which means the terrorists are shutting down every part of the nation's infrastructure. I wanted a better reason for their actions than "the main villain got really screwed over by the good guys and turned to the dark side," but with this kind of movie you just accept it and move on. McClane gets involved, things get personal, and much hell gets rained down on the bad guys.

With my genius overview of the plot out of the way, I'd like to say I absolutely adored this movie. This was the textbook definition of a summer blockbuster movie. It was great to see McClane, who really is just Jack Bauer with better one-liners, kill off assassins left and right while you've got the average guy Justin Long along for the ride to shout out what the audience is thinking. But it was also great to hear McClane's confusion as the one guy in the movie who doesn't get all this computer business. Speaking as someone who thinks figuring out computers is like figuring out an ancient, dead, foreign language, I knew how McClane felt being around all these pretentious computer hackers who think that people who don't understand computers are clearly mentally impaired. But I also like dragging otherwise normal people along for near-death experiences and the like. You get the audience surrogate, but you also get to watch a normal person get thrust into impossible circumstances and see how they react and rise (or fall) to the occasion. It's probably why I loved "District 9" so much.

For a movie all about cyber warfare, the action scenes are fantastic. The whole time I watched this movie, I couldn't stop thinking what a giant budget it must have had. But I think they use almost every cent of their budget well, making riveting action sequences that are a perfect mix of hand-to-hand combat and large-scale destruction and explosions. Much to my surprise, there's also some parkour thrown in there on the side of the terrorists. I wasn't expecting it, but I really enjoyed its random presence. My only complaint about the action is one of the final large-scale sequences, in which McClane is chased by a military jet fighter deceived to think he's the enemy. The fighter fires missiles at him repeatedly, collapsing the elevated freeway while McClane in his semi truck dodges. At one point, he even ends up on top of the fighter. This sequence was the only one that went a little too over-the-top and it really should have been cut down quite a bit. Aside from being too over-the-top, it's also kind of distracting from the plot as he's fighting a military plane, not the terrorists. The movie clocks in at 129 minutes, and it would have benefited from the cut.

In the end, you get all the action movie staples: the bad guy has a moment where he tries to argue that he's really the good guy, a family member is held hostage, things get personal, the second terrorist in command is killed off early, there are plenty of scenes of the government agencies running around looking ineffective, plenty of things are blown up, the hero and the villain exchange threatening witticisms, the villain was initially on the side of the good guys, the hero can suffer multiple physical wounds without being slowed down in the least, computers can do anything, and there's even a small hint of romance thrown in. And yes, for all those people out there who actually are fans of the franchise (and have therefore already seen this movie, rendering this sentence anticlimactic and pointless), you get John McClane's totally awesome, totally ridiculous catchphrase during the climax.

Grade: A+ (One of my favorite pieces of advice from a favored film critic of mine is to judge a movie against its own aspirations. "Live Free or Die Hard" wasn't trying to be the "Citizen Kane" of action movies. It was trying to be a grand old time at the movies in the summertime. Aside from my slight quibble about the last action sequence, it absolutely achieved this goal. If only we were lucky enough to get a great action movie like this every summer.)