Latest Updates - Faye Grant

---

Comment by Magic Marmalade:

Wow, this really lost it's way pretty darn fast!

....Right in front of my eyes in fact. For while the first two parter had a very strong idea at it's core, and felt like a split cinematic movie, in terms of the story, and the quality of the writing, this instantly feels less movie-like, and more tv miniseries / episodic.

It feels rushed too, bouncing from scene to scene without much explanation of how it got from one scene to the other. Across the three episodes, you see a valiant attempt to match the orginal story, and take up where it left off, rapidly, and by degrees disintegrate, visibly running out of ideas, and cobbling together stories just to get it along to the finale.

By the end, it gives way entirely to the most hokey, cornball hammery you can think of... It almost literally goes back in time from first episode to last in terms of quality of production, until it's virtually a spoof hippie sixties groovy buck rogers Flash Gordon spoof of love-in optimism, replete with rainbows of balloons, groovy cod-funk music, and unaccounted for space magic nonsense.

Forgets all the good characters they'd previously put work into building, and summarily disposing of others, losing any interest that marked the original out for special consideration.

Promising to begin with, total crap by the end.

---

Comment by Magic Marmalade:

I remember this being a real event back in the day, but have not seen it since.

So I was pleased to find the DVD sets of both this and The Final Battle in the Charity shop the other day...

...And I've got to say it's even better than I remember it!

Imagine Independence Day, but with fully rounded, non cartoonish characters, and depth of story-telling, and rather than a straight up, meat and potatoes alien invasion scenario, like War Of The Worlds, the superficially benign "visitors" have a subtle, fascistic scheme for world domination, with the story focussing on all the interpersonal relationships among the humans experiencing this, and how those character dynamics change when challenged, and what you find you have here is an excellently thought out, brilliantly written analogy for a modern fascist oppression, who's methods are more insidious than a flat out invasion, and who's true motives are far more sinister.

Granted, it's very, very eighties in terms of production quality, and the effects have mostly aged pretty badly, but the story is good enough to get over that, and the telling of that story is brilliantly handled. More subtle and nuanced by orders of magnitude than said: Independence Day, as you have human collaborators, as well as Alien, human sympathisers all considered well in the writing.

It's just a shame they didn't have the guts back then to go huge with this, and make a three hour, big budget movie of it (which is what this feels like... minus the budget, of course!), if they had, this would have been a landlmark in sci-fi cinema to this day, every bit the equal of the modern iteration of Dune.

As it is though, it's still a cracker... and I can't wait to get going on the Final Battle set.