squiggleslash

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I have to say I wasn't overly excited to hear that V was being remade, and I started to feel a sense of dread when I read the previews that suggested that it was more wingnut propaganda than science fiction. Part of the problem for me was the original series, which I enjoyed as an eight year old child, but have never cared for since.

Part of the problem was the sheer cheesiness of the original series, and part of it was rewatching some of it with my wife recently and really disliking the political overtones of the show. You see, nominally it was supposed to be - that is, what was pitched to ABC - a series about how easy it would be for the US to be taken over by Nazis. ABC balked at the complexities of such a premise, so Nazis were turned into aliens. What was left in the show were a few bits of Germano-Nazi symbolism: logos that kinda looked like swastikas, aliens who wore jackboots, an especially persecuted minority - though in this case scientists rather than any particular race, that kind of thing.

The problem here though was that the changes brought forth a substantial change in dynamic by which the show turned from being about Nazis to being, quite honestly, Nazi propaganda. By which I mean that if Goebbels had seen it, while he may have been offended by the jackboots and swastikas, he'd have been pleased with the central theme of xenophobia, of secret conspiracies by people who seem to look human (but are subhuman!), to enslave "real" humans. That's what Goebbels spent most of his career in the Nazi party doing himself, after all.

Not that the above, by itself, makes the show unwatchable. What makes the show difficult to watch, for me, is its kind of Jackie or Joan Collins like storytelling, as if someone has forced one of the Collins to write their own version of Star Wars, or Battlestar Galactica. Also difficult to watch is the sub-soap-opera acting. The character of Diana, the de-facto leader of the invaders, is especially bad: originally an attempt to insert a Doctor Mengele character, she's actually a soap opera bitch character, as, indeed, are virtually all the alien women. Now, this was from the early eighties, where they were still trying to figure out how to do strong female characters in response to the rise of Feminism (and in fairness, the female resistance leader isn't bad, even if she is a little bland), but that's more of an explanation than an excuse, it's still jarring.

So anyway, we now get V: the reimagining, which started on Tuesday and will continue for a few more episodes before going on hiatus and returning some time next year. The characters have all been changed. The effects have been modernized, and the setting likewise. So what's different?

There are very definitely some improvements over the original. One thing I immediately noticed was that the initial "space ships over the world" introduction, which in both Vs is supposed to be intimidating and frightening for the people on the ground, actually works in the new series in a way it didn't in the original. Even post Independence Day, watching the original results in a disconnect between the audience and the characters, the latter of whom are terrified, the former being more curious. In the reimagining, even with the various previews showing that the ship is going to turn into a giant TV, the initial introduction of the ships is very well done and very intimidating, for audience and characters alike.

Beyond that, and the general improvement in special effects, it's a mixed bag. Acting and characterization, for example, seems equally bad. There are some positives, Monica Baccarin is superbly creepy as the new Diana character, Anna. Beyond that most of the characters seem to be generic, and no more interesting than the majority of characters on 24.

Also irritating to the point that I'm not wanting to watch it any more are the crude references to right-wing mythology about Obama. For the last year or so the right has been portraying support for Obama as somehow religious or unreasonable (which is bizarre considering the amount of criticism Obama gets from the left, and the amount of unwavering support Bush got from the right until the last couple of years, which really did border on the insane. I mean, has anyone received a chain email about Obama of the type that were routinely sent about Bush?) - and part of V appears to tap into this nonsense and add a whole layer of Glenn Beck style conspiracy crap on top of it. Supporters of the Visitors hold up "Hope" signs with rainbows on them. A hamfisted and entirely inappropriate reference to "Universal Healthcare" is inserted into a discussion about a new medical treatment process. Supporters of the Visitors are portrayed as naive peaceniks, and near as damn it the only counter evidence in the whole thing is a single reference, by the resistance, to the Visitors having started "needless wars" (when they were hidden) - but, wait, they started them only to ensure that when they revealed themselves, they'd be greeted as the saviours of humanity.

Apologists for this crap claim that because the show was pitched in 2006, this invalidates the notion that there is any reference to Glenn Beckish propaganda in the show at all. This is ludicrous. The show didn't start filming until a few months ago. The scripts have no doubt been in development since the middle of 2008, which is when the right wing's "annointed one" crap started. It about makes as much sense to claim that the new V isn't based upon far right memes as it does to claim there are no aliens in the original V series.

The story itself didn't seem to be particularly high quality. For all of its faults, the original V kept to a "Show, don't tell" philosophy. The new series has the resistance leaders explain key story elements, possibly because the makers want to launch right into the middle of the story rather than spending a lot of time setting it up, but honestly, the feel of the pilot was clumsy and awkward as a result.

In the end, I'm not overly enamored with the show. Remove the politics and you have something that has more or less the same relationship to the original that the Bionic Woman remake had. The production values seem, relative to those of the era in which the show is made, roughly equal, the same combination of "Great for the day special effects, terrible for the day characterization." To that, you have to subtract the new V's poor storytelling. And finally, the show's unnecessary promotion of insane political memes just irritates the crap out of me.

If the original V got two out of five, this one gets a 1.
 

• Only five bothered to notify me that anything was being shipped.
• Two actually had tracking numbers but didn't bother to tell me them
• Two had free shipping. This is good, right? But if they're going to offer free shipping, then how do I rate people who charge something reasonable for shipping? I've been rating the latter a '4', but in reality, shouldn't "Doing what you're supposed to do" qualify as a 3 anyway, with free shipping qualifying as a five?
• How do you rate a description? Again, if it's accurate, ought it be a '3'? Like the shipping, I'm rating "At least they were honest" at '4', but again sellers are expecting "At least I was honest" to be five, which leaves no room to reward sellers who give full, detailed, descriptions that answer questions you didn't realize you had to ask in the first place.

• Description: "At least it's honest" gets a four. "Really did what they could to describe the item" gets a five. Nothing really gets a three because I wouldn't buy an item that doesn't get enough of a description to get a four if it's honest. I, fortunately, haven't had to rate anything a one or a two yet.
• Shipping time: Same day (or next business morning if on a weekend) gets a five. Within limits described in item description, max three business days, gets a four.
• Shipping costs: free gets a five. Cost appears to be roughly what it cost to send a four. Anything excessive gets something lower depending on how ridiculous the charges are. (Fortunately I haven't had to rate anything that low.)
• Communications: No communication at all gets a three. You at least need to have notified me the damned item shipped to get a four, and I want a tracking number before I'm willing to give you a five. That's on top of answering my questions if I have them.

1. I should really have started with still photography, and I don't mean "With that nice cheap digital Kodak I bought six years ago." (Leaving aside the fact it doesn't work any more...) The major reason is that I would have decent experience with lenses which I'm rapidly learning is something I don't have experience of.
2. Lenses have changed in the consumer electronics age. Whereas anything but the lowest end (or built-into-a-phone) type camera these days has a zoom lens, this is a relatively recent development, with fixed lenses being the "normal" lens prior to that even for this type of camera. The Reflex came with a 1:1.8 (don't ask me what that means exactly, but it defines the field of view), and that's a fixed field of view lens that was considered relatively high end when it came out because of the other features of the lens, such as the ability to vary the amount of light coming in. Even today, this is a lens that would fetch up to $200 on eBay. This previous reliance on fixed lenses, in turn, explains why the Bolex has three lens mounts.
3. On that note, the zoom lens I bought (the "macro zoom lens") appears to work well as a generic zoom lens (though it's frickin' big), and despite the "macro" description I'm having difficulty getting it to focus on nearby objects. But I'm wondering if that's due to the fact it's not a so-called "RX" lens. RX lenses are Bolex specific lenses designed to work around the optical distortion introduced by the prism-based Reflex system. It's difficult for me to describe, but essentially the closer the light leaves the lens to the center of the plane, the less it is distorted by the prism. For that reason, normal lenses can be OK as long as they're stopped down (light captured by the edges of the lenses is progressively blocked out, nominally done to reduce the amount of light, but in this case also helping reduce the distortion.) Now, I still don't know enough about the way this thing works to know under what circumstances large amounts of light will leave the lens from the edges of the lens, but I would assume the issues I'm having with focussing the thing are, in large part, related to that.
4. Or I may just not know how to use the zoom lens. I found it was difficult to keep anything in focus until I unscrewed a transparent glass from the front. The glass had to be there for a reason, though, right? You see my problem? I'm experimenting in an area I know very little about. On that note, the zoom lens has one flaw, which is that I can't stop down the amount of light coming in, which is especially a problem with the model of Reflex I have as it doesn't have a method to control the exposure time with the shutter.
5. Regardless, the image I see in the Reflex viewfinder is never particularly sharp, especially with the 1:1.8.
6. On the other hand, the Reflex viewfinder does seem to do a great job of making clear what the light levels are. I can be in a room and feel that it's bright enough to take a picture, and then look in the viewfinder and see that, very obviously, it's not even close to being bright enough.