mjcritelli

Having watched every episode of the new series, these are my thoughts:

• There is too much loud pulsating music to cue the audience, instead of letting the story pull them along. It is noticeably more intrusive and annoying.

• It seems that every time the police approach to interview them, the person flees and a chase scene, followed by handcuffing, ensues. Even innocent targets of questioning flee.

• Too much emphasis on surveillance camera videos to derive clues.

• We don't experience the police dialogue advancing their insights.

• The story development seems too rushed, These 42-minute episodes would benefit from another 5-7 minutes of footage.

As someone who has watched every Law and Order episode multiple times, this episode helped me understand why the revival of this franchise is falling short. In this episode, I thought that the plot line was thoughtful, the acting was very good, the writing was good and the ending was well done. But I could not figure out why the revival is falling short.

This episode helped me understand why the producers have to figure out how to squeeze 3-5 more minutes into an episode. Two critical pieces of evidence, both videos, one on the street, and one of a two-year-old video exchange between the slain police officer and his girl friend, showed up to advance the story line. How either of them was created or found was simply not addressed; one showed up in the cross-examination of a witness, without any understanding of how the defense attorney could have gotten hold of it.

I suspect that staying in the 42-minute run time the producers have targeted is causing the explanatory part of the story line or even some character development to suffer. Whatever the case, the revival episodes, including this one, just do not have the richness in dialogue or character or plot development that the extra minutes for each episode.gave the original series.

Having seen this film twice and liked it a lot, I also can understand why it has received so many harshly negative reviews. This is a character study of a famous man. However, it also strips away much of the glamour and nostalgia with which older Americans remember the space program. It has many scenes filmed in darker colors and deliberately has a claustrophobic feel to it. The handheld camera shots annoyed many viewers, but I felt that they symbolized the haphazard way in which the space program moved forward. As a country, we spent a lot of effort to lock up a few men, send them off into space, with the goal of having a photo-op on the moon before the Soviet Union got there. It is difficult for anyone who did not grow up before the 1980's to understand how frightened we were about the Soviet's lead in space exploration and how we made everything a battle between good and evil, with the Soviets being portrayed as evil. Given the logic of the Cold War, the notion of beating the Soviets to the moon made sense. We see a little of this emerging today with the fear of China, but it is hard for someone who did not live through the 1960's to appreciate how well this film captured what likely was going on under the hood.

For someone who wanted to see a real-life version of Star Wars, and wanted nonstop action, this is absolutely the wrong film to see. For someone who wanted a well-crafted study of a person who was really a pawn in the Cold War, this is a masterpiece. This is a film that bears additional viewings, becaus there were many scenes in which what was not discussed, but was in the background, whether it was the music, the staging, or the throwaway dialogue, was more important.

I did not give it a "!0" rating because I felt that it could have been 10-15 minutes shorter, retained the message and feel of the film, and been even more powerful as a result.