Flash Gordon (2007) Pilot review
I saw the movie once but I was still a teenager and apart from the music, Max von Sydow and the strange left-right camera movements, I don't remember anything so I watched the pilot without mostly any information about what this is and what it's about. And, well, while it wasn't unwatchable, it wasn't that good either.
All in all, the experience was somewhere between exciting and "been there done that". The pilot didn't show me any sort of new storyline or new ideas that haven't been done before, and for a pilot that is a full 60 minutes long without commercials, it should have had more to it.
I remembered from the film that there was some sort of space rocketry and alien planetry involved. And it was good how they solved the original's problem of the main character having no personal motivation at all with involving Flash's father in the whole fiasco. Also good was that they replaced space rockets with dimensional rifts, although the frequent use of the word rift and the name Doctor Gordon for Flash's father made it sound a lot like Half-Life.
Around that time, the whole thing fell apart a bit. Okay, a transdimensional portal opened -- but why does everyone keep talking about space aliens? One Spanish-speaking guy saw a spaceship and others saw a robot in a bowling alley. But from the minute Flash and Dale arrive on Mondo they keep talking about other planets. But how do they know that for sure an instant away? They just saw an unprecedented, unexplained scientific phenomenon. Why didn't anyone rule out, for example, other dimensions, when the portal-creating-device looks and behaves quite like Jerry O'Connell's slider apparatus. The look up the sky and notice the three moons twist is getting a really old (the lyrics of the theme song for "Land of the Lost" come to mind) and really cheap way out of showing that you're in another world.
And then there are the irritating things. There were some lines that just didn't make sense. Like why Flash said at the end that he would have to save the universe. Huh? Why? Where did that come from? As far as we know now, the kid is on a personal quest to find his dad, but there's no other motivation (or point) for him to go on overthrowing alien regimes.
And then there's the alien regime itself. In a 2007 work of film you have to address why everyone speaks perfect English, and you can do it in just a few sentences. Even if we get some kind of revealing as to why everyone on Mondo speaks American English, there should have been some sort of wonder on the side of the protagonists (especially the supposedly all-brains chick, Dale) as to why a., everyone in the alien world is humanoid and b., why they speak their language. If everything else was attempted to be modernised in the series, I just can't see why they left this out. Finally, Mondo just looked like it was thrown together in a hurry. It was not consistent. On outside shots you get the red tint in the picture but inner shots were dark and bluish. There wasn't any transition between many locations, which of course is attributable to budget reasons, but you still can't just stitch together an Arabian-style palace with a futuristic spaceship-style torture chamber and a downtown Detroit gas pump station or whatever it was that our heroes escaped through.
So in many aspects the series could be promising but in a lot of other aspects it was just badly developed and seemed lame. I would expect more from a 2007 sci-fi series, and of course the premise of Flash Gordon doesn't provide too much material for something very deep and complex. Then again, if they could tamper with one of the aspects of the original with adding personal conflicts and motivations, it just seems strange that they didn't do anything with the sci-fi element.
Please someone remind me, did I already write a review of Transformers or did I not?
All in all, the experience was somewhere between exciting and "been there done that". The pilot didn't show me any sort of new storyline or new ideas that haven't been done before, and for a pilot that is a full 60 minutes long without commercials, it should have had more to it.
I remembered from the film that there was some sort of space rocketry and alien planetry involved. And it was good how they solved the original's problem of the main character having no personal motivation at all with involving Flash's father in the whole fiasco. Also good was that they replaced space rockets with dimensional rifts, although the frequent use of the word rift and the name Doctor Gordon for Flash's father made it sound a lot like Half-Life.
Around that time, the whole thing fell apart a bit. Okay, a transdimensional portal opened -- but why does everyone keep talking about space aliens? One Spanish-speaking guy saw a spaceship and others saw a robot in a bowling alley. But from the minute Flash and Dale arrive on Mondo they keep talking about other planets. But how do they know that for sure an instant away? They just saw an unprecedented, unexplained scientific phenomenon. Why didn't anyone rule out, for example, other dimensions, when the portal-creating-device looks and behaves quite like Jerry O'Connell's slider apparatus. The look up the sky and notice the three moons twist is getting a really old (the lyrics of the theme song for "Land of the Lost" come to mind) and really cheap way out of showing that you're in another world.
And then there are the irritating things. There were some lines that just didn't make sense. Like why Flash said at the end that he would have to save the universe. Huh? Why? Where did that come from? As far as we know now, the kid is on a personal quest to find his dad, but there's no other motivation (or point) for him to go on overthrowing alien regimes.
And then there's the alien regime itself. In a 2007 work of film you have to address why everyone speaks perfect English, and you can do it in just a few sentences. Even if we get some kind of revealing as to why everyone on Mondo speaks American English, there should have been some sort of wonder on the side of the protagonists (especially the supposedly all-brains chick, Dale) as to why a., everyone in the alien world is humanoid and b., why they speak their language. If everything else was attempted to be modernised in the series, I just can't see why they left this out. Finally, Mondo just looked like it was thrown together in a hurry. It was not consistent. On outside shots you get the red tint in the picture but inner shots were dark and bluish. There wasn't any transition between many locations, which of course is attributable to budget reasons, but you still can't just stitch together an Arabian-style palace with a futuristic spaceship-style torture chamber and a downtown Detroit gas pump station or whatever it was that our heroes escaped through.
So in many aspects the series could be promising but in a lot of other aspects it was just badly developed and seemed lame. I would expect more from a 2007 sci-fi series, and of course the premise of Flash Gordon doesn't provide too much material for something very deep and complex. Then again, if they could tamper with one of the aspects of the original with adding personal conflicts and motivations, it just seems strange that they didn't do anything with the sci-fi element.
Please someone remind me, did I already write a review of Transformers or did I not?