Like “Battlestar Galactica,” “Falling Skies” is the tale of a handful of folks struggling to survive after sinister-looking spacecraft and large robots decimate the human population. Unlike “Galactica,” (spoiler in invisotext) it’s not set a long time ago in a part of the galaxy far, far away.
Producer Steven Spielberg is the marquee name here, but “Skies” is overseen post-pilot by writer-producer Mark Verheiden, a veteran of Ron Moore’s 21st century “Galactica.”
As with “Galactica,” there’s a lot of emphasis on how humans deal with each other in a post-apocalyptic environment.
There’s a fighting father-son team (Noah Wyle and Drew Roy) who don’t always see eye-to-eye.
There’s some discussion of how much say civilians have in the surviving military’s new human order, faintly echoing the early tension between Galactica commander Bill Adama and schoolteacher-turned-Colonial-president Laura Roslin. (The chief advocate for the civilians in “Skies” is female as well, a hot pediatrician played by sci-fi icon Moon Bloodgood of “Journeyman” and “Terminator Salvation” fame.)
Like the Cylons, the invaders can look like us, sort of, because the aliens can control us with devices attached to captured humans’ spines.
There’s a 9/11-style memory wall, like the one featured in “Galactica.”
Now the bad news. So far the “Skies” characters aren’t nearly as interesting as Roslin, the Adamas, Saul Tigh, Gaius Baltar, Sharon Valerii, Karl Agathon, Leoben Conroy or Kara Thrace. Nor are the alien villains yet as interesting as the baby-strangling Number Six.
The storytelling isn’t as compelling as BSG’s either --but, let’s face it, “Galactica” sets a pretty frakking high bar. “Skies” still ranks easily among TNT’s more watchable efforts, and stands a decent chance of emerging as something better than ABC’s “V” and NBC’s “The Event,” alien invasion dramas cancelled for good last month.
I am hoping Spielberg’s Fox fall sci-fi time-travel drama, “Terra Nova” (overseen by Moore’s “Star Trek” collaborators Rene Echevarria and Brannon Braga) works better.
… In terms of quality, it's closer to Jericho than BSG. Falling Skies is not, nor does it appears to want to be, a series of deep characters and big ideas. Like Jericho, it has a sentimental streak, and seems determined to undercut the grimness with Hallmark moments. Most of the secondary characters--sweet kids, gruff soldiers--are as flat as postapocalypse Boston, and even a non-postapocalypse buff will see some of the "twists" of later episodes coming. …
… Though overfamiliarity stops Falling from being as exciting a debut as it might have been, it doesn't breed contempt. And much of the credit goes to a cleverly twisted central idea and to a strong central performance from Noah Wyle as the everyman hero. … Wyle creates a welcome sense of empathy and plants a real person in the midst of the not-always-convincing aliens and sometimes cardboard humans around him. As is often the nature of such programs, Skies does ask you to accept a lot of clunky dialogue and a few too many easily spotted twists. Even so, fans of the genre can embrace it as a summer-viewing diversion — one that's likely to work even better for younger viewers, who haven't seen all the films from which it borrows.
… sags after its taut two-hour pilot. I lost count of the times I paused episodes to try to understand an inexplicable moment or to complain to my couchmate about a predictable development. There are some promising ideas and story lines here, but the pilot far outshone subsequent episodes in terms of quality and efficiency. It's not as if every decision the characters make is silly, but too many inexplicable decisions are made by various survivors, and it's not hard to predict exactly how and why those decisions will go wrong. When characters do things because the plot requires them to rather than because those actions make sense to them and to us, eye-rolling frustration is inevitable. …
… pulp fiction, but it's very effective pulp fiction. The performances for the most part hover in the range of "solid" …
… As a classic action-and-ideas science-fiction drama, “Falling Skies” is at least average — good on the action, a little muddled on the ideas. And the pilot episode, directed by Carl Franklin (“One False Move”), looks great. But the show also appears to have been subject to the Spielberg imperative, which requires that suspense, speculative imagination and battlefield drama come wrapped in a heavy blanket of family soap opera, preferably involving single parents and troubled teenagers. …
… if children are going to strap on guns, set traps, jerry-rig explosions and dive for cover during gunfights, it had better be fun. And "Falling Skies" is very much that, the serious fun of those long summer days that you and your kid brother spent blowing up the bad guys and saving the world. …
… makes up for its special-effects budget deficit by preoccupying itself with a lot of hack sociology, in which various character archetypes express themselves in us-vs.-them cliches. The writing and acting tend toward scenes and lines we’ve heard in countless, failed sci-fi TV series — a form of plagiarism that fans of the genre more kindly regard as homage. …
The San Francisco Chronicle says:
… may not hold a candle to J.J. Abrams' "Super 8," also produced by Spielberg, but it's better than either "V" or "The Event." …
… Is Falling Skies a collection of outtakes from War of the Worlds? Is it E. T. with a mean streak? Saving Private Ryan with lizard-bugs? The answer is all of the above and less. For years, Spielberg has been making family dramas adorned with the trappings of other genres, each time with a little less to say. And with Falling Skies, in which he stumbled into the epiphany that the conquest of the Earth by genocidal space insects would not only mean the extermination of the human race but — gasp! — also the end of childhood innocence, he has bottomed out. At least, let us hope so. Fervently. Devoutly. Desperately. …
… Once I started watching, I couldn’t stop. Don’t look now, but “Falling Skies” could be a summer obsession. …
… It is not a puzzle of mysterious motives that we must piece together, on the order of sci-fi series such as “V,’’ “The X-Files,’’ “Fringe,’’ and, of course, “Lost.’’ “Falling Skies’’ is just a dependable, us-vs.-them action-adventure series …
… guess what? It’s really good. So good and so entertaining, in fact, that the pressure is squarely on Terra Nova not to become a high-priced flop (cough, FlashForward, cough) come fall. Hey, stranger things have happened. … the entertainment value and suspense of Falling Skies is paced just right. You get the sense that we’ll get those answers eventually. And yet, you want to devour the next episode immediately. You know, like a raptorsaurus.
… has its moments action-wise, but the soapier elements mostly fall flat. … almost painfully old-fashioned -- filled with heroism, last-minute rescues and regular expressions of religious faith, reminding us that the truly devout are blessed with the inner peace to accommodate all manner of bad news, including an alien attack blasting the crap out of their home planet. There's none of the subtlety of "Battlestar Galactica," say, in paralleling current reality. This hews closer to "Independence Day," with a touch of "Red Dawn." …
9 p.m. Sunday. TNT.
