Falling Skies tried to pull off Inception and didn't quite succeed

Tom Mason just prior to jumping off a balcony and miraculously escaping
the alien overlords who tried to extract information from his subconscious mind.
The escape seemed daring at first, but far too easy. Why in the hell didn't they
chase after him? Maybe he's still dreaming. It seems possible.

So Sunday's episode of Falling Skies really had me thinking "you writers at TNT watched Inception, didn't you?" Only in the case of Falling Skies, it was not as well done as Christopher Nolan's brilliant film simply because they didn't employ the use of the totems (totems are a good thing for the audience because it keeps us from getting frustrated).

For those of you who haven't seen Christopher Nolan's Inception, a totem is a thing that you construct. You don't let anyone touch it because only you should know the balance and the weight. Ariadne's was a chess piece, Cobb's was a spinning top, and Arthur's was a weighted dice. The purpose of the totem was to implant this idea (when you saw it in action): your world is not real.

In the Falling Skies episode entitled "Strange Brew", Tom Mason is once again the guest of the alien overlords (having been caught in last week's episode during the last five seconds). Now to be fair, Tom has been a house guest of the alien overlords before. Last time they talked with him and ended up planting a bug or something inside him. So this time around, it had to be different, right? Plus the stakes are much higher due to interference from another alien race called the Volm.

Karen is like the Darth Vader of this show.

We have Karen (she's the main bad guy that replaced the alien overlord from last season) and she wants to find out which of four cities is going to be struck by the resistance. Is it going to be Jacksonville, Boston, New York, or Chicago? Rather than resort to torture which Karen says she knows Tom can resist (he is a college professor after all), they decide to try and extract it from his subconscious. Think dream within a dream within a dream only unlike Inception, I kind of got lost.

Part of the fun of an Inception-style plot is figuring out if the reality you are being shown is real or not. Sometimes it's blatantly obvious. For example, Tom Mason shot Karen in the head. This led me to say "There's no way they'd off Karen that easily. She's like the Darth Vader of this show and for them to just shoot her and be done...not buying it." And sure enough, it turned out to be a dream.

I'm really not sure if the whole "Inception" thing really worked out well for Falling Skies. It made for some awesome flashbacks and for us as an audience to become emotionally connected to Tom's first wife, but it also distanced us from Tom's second wife and his baby daughter in a weird way. We also saw Anne Glass and his daughter Alexi murdered off camera by the alien overlords. In fact, we didn't even get a good look at them at all. This makes me think that Tom is just in another dream. But is he? Because it sure as heck seems that (at the end of the episode) he's not really dreaming. I mean he got away from the alien overlords by simply jumping off a balcony. They didn't even chase him down. Who does that?

If this is really how they are going to play things, i.e. off Anne and Alexi like they were nothing and then just let Tom get away by jumping off a balcony, I'm very disappointed. There are only two episodes left in Falling Skies this season, and I'm hoping to get some clarity on the things we saw in "Strange Brew" that left me full of questions. That's the danger, I think, whenever someone wants to channel Christopher Nolan and the Inception plot. To clarify further, the idea of layering dreams on top of each other can be aggravating to the audience if not anchored and explained well. Hence, Falling Skies should have used totems.

Either that, or they should never have tried to duplicate Inception in a forty minute episode. It just doesn't work.

Falling Skies is back and the effects are cooler than ever

There are not any real spoilers in this post.

This is the poster that's been online for a month. At right is the Volm. At left is the
new mech/robot that's super destructive and looks rather awesome. The Volm
look cool, don't you think?

Last night one of my favorite series aired its two hour season premiere. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If you like science fiction, you really should be watching Falling Skies. That being said, I've got one bone to pick, and it's that I don't like the nine month gap in time from last season to this season. At the end of last season, a new alien showed up and none of us who were watching the show could tell if they were friend or foe. Well for now, they seem to be a friend, and that's a good thing because the resistance had its hands full in dealing with the aliens that originally attacked them.

Noah Wyle on a horse makes everything else irrelevant.

The new ones (called the Volm) are really cool looking. They kind of remind me of Guillermo del Toro's Abe Sapien in the Hellboy movies (for the record, I liked Abe Sapien). So that being said, is Falling Skies on your watch list? Is Noah Wyle not enough to lure you to the screen? Is a dystopian post-apocalyptic world where three alien races are currently at war with each other on the surface of the Earth not cool enough to warrant one hour of your time every Sunday?

I hope some of you out there will start watching this show so that we can have discussions about the episodes in the comments!

Falling Skies emphasizes the importance of fathers

There may be some spoilers in this blog post. >,<

Three months of in-world time has passed between last season and the start of this one. First off, I love the alien invasion story of Falling Skies, and I was glued to my seat last night for the two-hour season two premiere. If you are a fan of dystopian apocalyptics, then you might want to give this science-fiction drama a try. It has all the elements. People overcoming huge obstacles to ban together to drive aliens who have already conquered Earth back into space, cute boys and girls (there are no fat people in this show and everyone is in shape despite the scarcity of food resources), and computer generated effects galore. The fact that everyone is gorgeous doesn't bother me. I'm pretty much used to it and have grown to accept/expect it in my television.

Drew Roy plays Hal Mason in Falling Skies.

But behind all the glitz of the show's significant budget, good writing, and eye candy, there are solid themes of fatherhood. Noah Wylie plays Tom and the most important thing to him in the world are his three sons. And it's just refreshing for me to see a single dad portrayed in such a good light. On top of that he's an exceptional former school teacher, so he's really smart, reads, and is constantly teaching his sons how to grow into good men with strong moral compasses. The other thing that I appreciate about the show is that it steers clear of religion for the most part. People are conquering their own fears and their insecurities through love, companionship, and dealing with the situations without resorting to on-screen prayer to alleviate despair.

Ben Mason teaching Matt Mason (his little brother) how to shoot skitters (aliens) so that he can defend
himself. I really like Ben Mason. He's probably the most interesting character right now outside of Tom. He's
kind of become a super warrior because he has alien DNA or something inside of him now. He can run
marathons without tiring, can hear and see things no one else can, and is really strong--like the kind
that can bench press a Toyota truck.

They've also borrowed a page from H.R. Geiger and the Alien franchise by using creepy body invasion. The alien conquerors control human children with biological harnesses and then last night, we saw the doctor pull a weird worm thing out of Tom's eye that later turned into a metal ball bearing and later still, a butterfly with teeth sharp enough to cut glass.

I really need to add this button to my sidebar. It's just too cool.

So if you are a fan of science-fiction, join the saga of the 2nd Mass (Second Massachusetts) as they resist the invaders from another world. It's on TNT on Sunday's this summer. I'm so glad I have a DVR so that I can record True Blood (which shows at the same time).

Questions I want answered this season:

1) What's up with Ben? Is he ever going to be truly safe from the aliens?

2) What did the aliens do to Tom? They really screwed him up. Did they put more of those worms in his body?

3) What does the flying butterfly worm thing do aside from cut glass?

4) Why did they let all the people go at th same time as Tom by just dropping them off in a field? Then they massacred them while Tom walked off? It's clear that they did not value the other humans at all, but put extreme value on Tom. I'm thinking it has something to do with his son Ben. It also seemed like they wanted Tom to see that they spared him.

Science-fiction news that caught my eye this week

Here's the Prometheus International poster.

I really liked this Prometheus featurette that came out on May 21st. It has Charlize Theron talking about her character Meredith Vickers, and how she's the one in charge of the doomed mission in the movie. It has some clips that I hadn't seen previously, including a part where she roasts some guy in his own space suit with a flame thrower saying, "I'm not letting him back on my ship." It's really intense.

In addition to Prometheus (which continues to enjoy viral marketing), the Walking Dead started filming season three. Of the choice words being said to the camera were "There are samurai sword wielding characters that are turning up..." I love the summer, but I can't wait for the Walking Dead to return in the fall. But before that happens, I'll be able to enjoy the last season of Breaking Bad which promises to be absolutely amazing.

And last but not least, if you are someone (like me) that enjoyed watching Falling Skies last year, it has been renewed and is returning to TNT this June. So in the movies we get Prometheus and Brave, and on television we get aliens from outer space conquering Earth. Summer is shaping up to be pretty hot. Anyone else seeing MIB 3 this weekend? I'll probably try to catch one showing tonight.

My Thoughts On A Few Shows

Wow what a weekend for shows. I didn't make it to Tree of Life as I'd planned but will do so sometime this week. The movie I did get to was Green Lantern...it was so-so but I liked all the flashy stuff. I saw it at a matinee so I don't feel that I wasted too much of my money. If anything, the film was too long and had some boring parts in it. I just wanted Hal Jordan to kick some ass and it took a while for him to get around to doing so. And then the whole Hector as Parallax's minion wasn't entertaining at all. I'm not sure what exactly he was supposed to be other than some guy that ranted about how Hal Jordan always got everything and he got handed a steamy pile of crap. Plus the effect of Parallax being all smoky and just winding around skyscrapers looked cheesy. "I'm a smoke monster...hear me roar...!"

Falling Skies on TNT was awesome. I really got into the characters and am looking forward to following this series all summer. I thought that the effects given the aliens were good, I like how they revealed a lot of the backstory through different voices (especially those of the children), and I like the whole idea of the "harness" turning kids into brain slaves. I'm kinda wondering where they'll be going with this. I guess it's not all a curse because in the preview for next week's episode, one guy remarked that his son who had trouble breathing had been "cured" by the alien harness. Interesting...so it controls you but cures you of diseases...hmmm.  How is this going to play out in the course of the show?

Then of course I watched the season finale of Game of Thrones. This series thus far has been stunning, however, the dragons at the end of last night's episode looked terrible (think Photoshopped onto the screen by someone that couldn't get hired on by Industrial Light and Magic).  I'm really concerned about how some of the jaw dropping scenes are going to look in seasons two and three. Like, how is the attack on the Fist of the First Men going to look when the white walkers destroy the 300 men of the Night's Watch? How are the dragons going to look when Daenerys uses Drogon to kill the corrupt slavers in the city of Astapor?  Ugh...think SyFy Network special effects of Megashark vs. Giant Octopus and you've got the picture.

Camelot is also now over for the season and I have to say that this show was a huge disappointment for me. It seemed to start out strong and there were several parts of it that I liked but then it just went downhill and actually kinda got boring lol. I really don't know if I'll watch it next season if there is even a next season (I get the impression others didn't like it that much either from reading the forums). 

Have a great Monday and I hope your Father's Day weekend was excellent.

Falling Skies

Falling Skies is a new TNT series created by Robert Rodat and Steven Spielberg. The first season has 10 episodes in it so it'll be a little longer than the first season of AMC's "The Walking Dead".

Falling Skies tells the aftermath of an alien invasion with the focus on a group of survivors that are struggling to fight the aliens. It premieres Sunday, June 19th, 2011. Needless to say, I'm really excited. Now I'll get to watch this show and Game of Thrones on the same night :)