Reviews

Creating a believable villain whose motives audiences can understand is a very tough task. It's so tough most writers resort to making their villains cardboard cut out characters who are scary but unfathomable.

Even the best villains are usually demoted to acting as a foil for the hero. It's rare they are the main protagonist.

Yet here we have the whole plot focusing on Kevin Spacey portraying a very believable villain who is about as evil as you could imagine. And he's married to a woman (Robin Wright) who seems just as evil.

Logically we should recoil in horror. Somehow though we are made to not only feel empathy for the monster and his wife but to actually cheer them on as they carry out all sorts of despicable acts.

The trick is pulled off through a combination of brilliant writing, acting and directing. I can hardly wait for the second series.

I keep watching this show in the hope that its producers will address the blindingly obvious flaw that is currently holding it back.

The flaw, as I see it, is the total lack of humor.

I can see how many might see the implausibility of the show's basic premise as the big problem. Namely that a single guy is an expert in every single branch of science and somehow manages to solve problems that would normally require a team of people and a massive laboratory by working on his own with little more than a few test tubes and a laptop computer on a desk in a motel room.

Actually I do have a bit of a problem with that. In the original British series the show is derived from the main character didn't work everything out on his own. In the US version the implausibility of the science does get in your face way too much of the time.

But I'd happily suspend my disbelief to the required extent if the scriptwriters would only adopt the same light-hearted approach to what the characters say as they do to the science. They get away with worse stuff in 'Bones' but it reaches a big audience because the interactions between the characters are so often humorous. Here the main character is totally deadpan throughout. It's awfully hard to empathize with him when he takes all the Hollywood Science so seriously.

The obvious way to fix the show would be to somehow kill off the main character and replace him with someone that has a sense of humor.

I'd love that to happen as I normally enjoy shows like this and quite liked the British series.

If you want to watch a real 'quality' movie get hold of The Eden Formula. This wondrous film must have cost all of $50 to make. It features a wafer thin script, pathetically bad sets, lighting and camera work, and a stop motion, paper-mache monster that is utterly laughable (it looks like they sometimes used a guy in a rubber suit and/or a glove puppet for the monster - but all were equally dreadful).

The actors all speak their lines as though they've never seen them before and are reading off a teleprompter. The special effects are way beyond lousy. And the only sad thing is that they dropped the really nifty original title 'Tyranasaurus Wrecks' which sums up exactly what you get for the full 90 minutes.

This is what happens when you scrape the bottom of the barrel so hard you break through to the crud that lies underneath.

I loved every minute of it.