It is amusing how poorly performed things make you to think and to learn more than good ones. Take V (2009), for example: sci-fi series, with the Companion from Firefly and spaceships, which may seem like a good thing to kill your time. If you are experienced enough in watching movies, you may tolerate poor CGIs, but then comes the absurd plot that would require more than that in order to watch the series. It’s like a parallel universe where people are even more stupid than in this one: nobody questions why the aliens look exactly like humans (the CGIs suggest that they didn’t have enough budget for alien costumes), and when the aliens heal humans and share energy with them, promising to share the technology, nobody asks to teach humans those technologies, but virtually everyone is happily accepting them without an understanding of how it works. Hold on, actually that’s exactly what happens here. Okay, they’ve captured that aspect of humanity pretty well, but then there are obvious cheap movie tricks, almost as bad as in Star Wars: even though the antagonists are dull and acting stupid, you can’t sympathize the protagonists even if you try: most of them are robotic and unpleasant like tech support (or those cyborg spammers, if there is a difference). Good folks are pretty, bad ones are ugly or lay slimy eggs, and they just disappear when they die (what they are doing all the time) – as usual. It seems to be separated from the floor of comics-based movies just by the thin layer of Star Wars.
But it makes one to think how come that they are so bad in making the script any convincing. Reminds of Nigerian spammers, street cons, and other online and offline scam, be those single letters or long acquaintances, making one to question whether there’s another layer of manipulation going on, or the scammers are just that dumb.
Of course, screenwriters and directors are supposed to manipulate your feelings, and buying it is what helps one to enjoy a movie, but this one is quite hard to stay involved in. Apparently that’s what gave rise to weird interpretations of the series: when something is so obviously fake or empty, one just tries to find something else there – as a melody in noise “music”, anything that makes sense in David Lynch movies, or images when your eyes are closed. A human mind refuses to accept that a plot that bad can exist, and to be written by another sentient human being. Some even learn to enjoy such things, like those weirdos with religious books, or arthouse cinema viewers – just reading the bits that don’t make sense as metaphors to whatever they want those to mean. I think I understand them better now: you really get plenty of random thoughts while watching such a movie – like pitying the actors who have to play in those scenes, wondering what they are thinking, how did they end up performing there, how they’ll explain it to themselves or others, whether or not they are hooked on heroin by the director, or did the directors mix up the plot with a porn movie, leading to a particularly interesting porn there somewhere.
Here is just one little scene: the emotionless alien queen puts on an evil grin right after convincing the surrounding people that she is sad. Since it’s hard to imagine that the screenwriter thought something like “it isn’t enough that we show every 2-3 minutes how evil and emotionless she is: the viewers may think that she is actually sad in this scene, what would contradict everything that happened during the previous 30 minutes; let’s add one more evil grin, even though it doesn’t make sense for an emotionless alien lizard in human skin to grin at all”, one tries to find an explanation that makes sense. Unless you are willing to search for hidden messages or get into other kinds of crackpottery, the easiest solution here is to keep in mind that one can never underestimate people. Or maybe the writers are just angry and/or misanthropic, saying “that’s how stupid I think you are”. That’s what art is about, sometimes – conveying a message, not just making amusing things. It may seem dull, since a message can be written clearly and in plain text instead, but the important aspect here is that you have to digest it yourself, while the piece of art serves as an illustration, which makes you to think. Like the Socratic method.
Alien culture is rarely elaborated and different enough from human cultures in sci-fi, but in V it’s one of the worst: though it’s mostly absent, the “V” symbol is used in the few bits that are present, making those contradictory to the whole setting, or implying another highly unlikely coincidence.
No interesting or fun characters there, pretty much every character is rather annoying. The story, if you cut out all the nonsense, is absent.
On the “sci” part of “sci-fi”, it’s even worse: there are plot-critical recurring events such as DNA “extraction” (it is unclear what they mean by that, but the purpose seems to be just a collection) using thousands of needles, without putting the patients to sleep, and making it a torture, while they can heal (and even revive) patients without touching them. It’s somewhat like in The Matrix, which was dumbed down by replacing human brain usage for computational power with human body usage for heat, except that in V it probably already was that way in the original script. Hackerman-style hackers are also present in the series, of course, together with other movie cliches. There is plenty of implausible events happening, along with implicit assumptions that we’re getting all the physics and biology (one can count mathematics too, because of Hackerman characters) wrong, and without any alternative models or explanations provided, making it more like magic-fiction. Or, perhaps, science-themed trash-fiction.