Pages

Monday, August 3, 2009

Defying Gravity Falls Flat


The premier of the new sci-fi adventure series by ABC, Defying Gravity, about astronauts on a six year mission to Venus gives off the feeling of lackluster rather than exciting entertainment. The hype around the show was its offering of sexiness and sci-fi thrills, a popular tagline for the shows being “sex meets sci-fi”. Now those are two words that say it should at least have some popcorn entertainment, but no, it doesn’t. Instead, you get a very boring show, without action or any of that much boasted sexiness. That’s not to say that there aren’t any hot women or sex scenes, it has those, but the scenes are stupid and done in that cheesy romantic floating in space kind of way. Think 2001 Space Odyssey, but instead of a floating baby in space we have a floating naked pregnant lady, nice killing of a classic guys. For a two hour premier, this episode had little of interest. The entire thing followed the launch of the mission, where they spent most of the time pulling someone inside the ship who was tethered in space, while showing flashbacks of the crews training. This doesn’t exactly seem like mind blowing sci-fi…does it. How is it entertaining to watch someone pull on a cable for 30 minutes? Plus, there is this mysterious computer or entity that chooses who will be in the crew, sort of like Hal of Jesus, it’s the Hal the Messiah.

Generally, Defying Gravity seems like the lesser version, and rip-off, of Virtuality. Somebody at the network heard about the plot to Virtuality and decided to make their own, and bam we get this crap. This show makes the drawn out pilot of Virtuality seem like the new Star Trek film in comparison that said. Thanks for coming out to play ABC but leave the sci-fi to another network. If you were going to put money on it, which long juried space crew would you name as the most likely winner, Fox’s Virtuality, SyFy/MGM’s Stargate Universe or ABC’s Defying Gravity?

Find out more about SGU or Virtuality on the links below

No comments: