The Last Frontier

It's not a dull series, the scenery is gorgeous the idea interesting. You could argue that the director wanted to put too much stories in one story. Besides that please fire the chief scenarist for any next season. This series is so full of cliche dialogues, it's an insult to the audience, you wonder why any serious director or producer would let that pass.

This is such an unfortunate case of not having a singular vision and committing to it.

It had a really interesting setup, and greatly executed, but shortly it begun to fall apart.

I get the sense that one person had a great idea and then more people started contributing to make it more "accessible" to more audiences, resulting in a bland mixed soup.

Unfortunate, and doesn't seem that it will get any better looking at the cast.

• Mom can we go watch "Law Abiding Citizen", "The Blacklist" and "Fast Five"?

• No, there is "Law Abiding Citizen", "The Blacklist" and "Fast Five" at home.

... puts on The Last Frontier

It's not bad. It's somewhere between meeh and okay. It feels like "High School Writing meets Hollywood Budget, Winter Edition: The Series".

Visually it's compelling, and the concept was intriguing, but the characters and plot are sausage water in a world full of sausages.

* updated. Just watched the majority of episodes 3. Jesus Forklift Chrust. I couldn't bear to finish it. It all went from meeh to wtf, very fast...

They obviously did not use any sort of technical experts or cultural advisors. Not about law enforcement, aviation, wilderness search and rescue, not even hospital operations. It's clear they never spoke to anyone from Alaska or that knew anything about Fairbanks.

I get the need for creative story telling choices. But every single thing they got wrong and not just a little wrong, there was no creativity or artistic choices. The prop and production staff were clearly using by-the-book out of date style guides not intended for location driven stories. It would have worked fine for a generic police procedural set in a nondescript mainland/lower 48 urban landscape where prop and location details don't matter. But they got everything wrong.

One example; the theft of the aircraft black box, they showed the "ambush" taking place on a small bridge on narrow road. In reality the road from where they put their location and "on the way to Anchorage" would have been the Park's Highway, very wide, very flat, with the vegetation further cut back from the pavement.

It wouldn't have impressed production to use technical advisors and at the very least local knowledge. The last season of True Detective took place in Alaska while being filmed in Iceland. It was visually very different from Alaska they still managed to capture some of the feeling of a large Alaskan village.

The story is somewhat digestible, assuming you don't mind reality taking frequent coffee breaks. Plot points wander in and out like confused tourists, occasionally bumping into each other and pretending it was intentional.

Fortunately, the film distracts you enough with breathtaking scenery and good acting.