jvanhalderen

This series started out quite nice. It starts with a tour of our own solar system of which we have a learned a lot in the last years. For those people who have a passion for astronomy/cosmology, not a lot of new information is presented. However, the manner in which they present it is refreshing and also entertaining.

The problem however starts in season 2. As the 'known' subjects have been discussed in the first season, the second season struggles in finding educational scientific materials. Instead they start leaning towards fiction and speculation more and more. Subjects as 'Sex in space', 'Alien faces' that contain no educational information at all. These episodes felt to me like a poor attempt to put nowadays teenagers drama and fantasy into a scientific perspective just to get a higher audience, an audience who will never comprehend the actual real science behind studies like these.

The scientific community has made it a point on their agenda to make science, in particular astronomy, cosmology and theoretical science more accessible to the general public. An action I totally support. However, showing nice CGI's, some enthusiastic scientists that seem to care more about their own popularity then real science, in this case, gives a wrong idea about what we actually do and do not know.

The show contains a lot of solid information but also a lot of speculations and should not be presented as fact or as general accepted theories.

For those people who are interested in the science part, I would recommend watching "National Geographic's Journey to the Edge of the Universe". A stunning documentary also with mind blowing CGI's and very understandable for any person.

Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1363109/

Even though there are a lot of movies or miniseries out there created on a low-budget, they often can surprise you by having a good script, acting or an original story line. Specially in the sci-fi genre, where you can get more extreme in the fantasy part, I tend to give a movie more slack.

This mini-series however annoyed me after the first 10 minutes. The idea starts out OK, a secret military project has created a device to manipulate the weather. Early in the start of the series it gets activated and it will be obvious to you that you can find better special effects on you-tube made by 10-year old. OK, bad effects, I can live with that.

Then it all gets worse, a lot of characters get introduced which totally do not contribute to the story in any way. They needed a setting to show us how this bad weather effects the general public, so they introduce not 1 or 2 but 3 complete side-stories which could have been taking from any bad drama series on TV. In addition, the editing was so terrible that they pasted the scenes of the boredom after each other, letting you watch up to 20 minutes to irrelevant stories. The worse of these being a woman of course who is pregnant and gets trapped in a nasty place..guess what happens.

The second part that annoyed me is that this movie did not get any (or very bad) review before actually shooting it. Any film student could have filtered out the cliché parts, bad sequencing and put a more scientific realistic view to this concept. They most likely would have done it for free.

But then the worst part. The actors that accepted a role for this piece of crap. They often do not realize the damage they cause to their own career, instead it's only the money they are interested in.

Luke Perry: Maybe not my biggest fan as 90210 certainly is not my genre but still, I've seen him take on some pretty good roles for example The 5th Element and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He has set a certain standard in the movie industry for himself. A standard we come to expect when advertising a movie featuring him. I'm pretty sure he didn't even read the script, such fail.

James van Der Beek: Maybe the only one that took his seriously. The character he portraits has potential, maybe not completely original but non the less, it could have made a fine character for any SF series. I feel his disappointment in ever excepting this role.

David James Elliott and his JAG buddy Patrick Labyorteaux: I guess their JAG money ran out. Again actors, stop taking roles blindly just for the money, you can do better than this.

All together: bad directing, mediocre acting, very bad script, worst editing and terrible effects. All on a very promising idea.

Do not waste your time on this movie. If you have seen part 1, you have seen it all. This part contains nothing new, same stunts, same one-liners same stupid action hero.

Actually the only thing I liked about this movie was Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance as the mastermind criminal with no conscience.

This movie is way too americanized, but what can you expect from freaks like Tom Cruise.

Don't waste your time on this!

Thank you Tom Cruise for making Hollywood movies even worse than what they were.