We’ve been seeing previews for the past 3 weeks or so, and now (Monday night) it’s on. Who’s watching it? Comments?
Initial impressions are: Close Encounters plus The X Files plus Dark Skies, told a la Steven King. I mean, 20 hours??
Share your opinions, theories, etc here.
Not so much “Taken” as “Takin’ Forever”. Languid is too weak a word to describe the pacing of this supposed drama.
And maybe because the dialog is so incredibly sparse (and lame), but I’m finding the score to be really obnoxious.
I think their special effects budget must be at least in the hundreds of dollars, based on the quality of the floating balls of light and the Grey alien.
The SF Chronicle seens to hold it in high regard.
I’m hoping for an encore presentation of the first episode, as the Jets-Raiders MNF game was too good to pass up.
This is the SciFi Channel… You’ll be watching encore presentations until your eyes bleed.
7PM tomorrow night, right before the next ‘episode.’
[sub]Of course, you already missed the first encore presentation. Right after the movie itself, at 11PM. Because, y’know, there’s so very little science fiction programming available, after all.[/sub]
Did the guy hiding in the shed and the kids on bikes remind aynone of E.T.?
I did like machine gunning the WWII aliens. I’ve always wondered why some abductee guy never ‘woke up’ and got a baseball bat.
Yeah. Seems a lot of these shows revolve around people being tricked or scared out of fighting back; science fiction has made me paranoid enough about aliens that if I encountered one I would simply assume it to be hostile and do everything I can to protect myself (involving baseball bats of course)
THWACK!
Draw the pythagorean theorem in the dirt with a big stick.
I read the book in a day last weekend. Another damn story that stops just short of telling you what is going on. Hopefully the ending of the series is a little more clear then the book. Sure, tehy’ll tell you their aliens, but if you really hope to understand the reasons they do what they do, or where they come from, or how they do what they do, your going to waste 20 hours of your life. I’m so sick and tired of “Solaris Syndrome” where not having answers is supposed to make it deeper or artsy. Blah. Make desicions, dammit. Take a stand. This “you never know” bullshit gets tired after the first hundred or so times . . .
“Calculating God”, now there is a book about aliens that explains itself definitively from start to finish.
DaLovin’ Dj
I think it was terrible that during the show, they had that news report at the bottom of the screen:
Steven Spielberg presents taken
How could anyone steal his Hanukkah presents! What an awful thing to do, especially during the start of his sci fi show.
Gee whiz!!!
I’m not up on my UFO and abduction lore -vs- science fiction, but I seem to remember reading that abductees are incapable of resisting, not out of fear but out of some mysterious paralysis.
Back to the TV show, I feel compelled to mention that Eric Close, the actor playing the hiding-in-the-shed ET was the lead actor in the TV series “Dark Skies.” Ironically, he was the Fox Mulder-like character, crusading against the government and trying to bring the truth to light.
Yeah, but you’d think they’d forget to charge the batteries, or their mind would wander while hypnotising the earthlings, or they’d stub their toe at the critical part or something…
Also misdirection. The aliens in this story use your own thoughts to lure you. For example a little kid sees his favorite storybook animal while another sees his father. They call this technique thought screens and I think they could have come up with a better name.
In the book there are alot of places where the word “taken” is used for dramatic effect. Typically written iwth extra periods like “I’ve been . . . taken”. It kept coming up over and over that I started laughing everytime they did it. I imagine the mini-series (from which the book was adapted - not the other way around) must use a real nice peace of dramatic scoring. Any good music whenever someone says . . . . . . . taken?
:looks around expecting something bad to happen:
DaLovin’ Dj
…I see a Cray with Doom IV…anybody have a kleenex?
I’ve watched both episodes and (I admit) I’m hooked - even though I can’t argue with many of the criticisms already mentioned here.
For anyone who’s been watching -can you explain the alien-in-the-shed?? From what I can tell, he was just the missing 5th visitor from the Roswell ship crash and was hiding in the shed because he was hurt and needed help. Then, he unexpectedly connects with Sally. However, towards the end of his visit, he tells the son something like “my work here is almost done -I won’t allow you to interfere” which makes it sound as if the whole impregnation thing was actually pre-planned??
Also, that episode makes it seem as though humans seeing the aliens see who they want to see (because the aliens can sort of see their minds and appear to them as they wish). After all, John appears just like the illustration in Sally’s Sci-Fi magazine. However, while the alien in the lab looks like an alien to everyone except the Jewish doctor, “John” looks human to everyone. That’s confusing too.
Or is it just me? Perhaps I just need some caffeine…
Cricket
Alright, I tuned in and tried again to watch an entire episode of “Taken”. I just can’t seem to do it-and I used to be all sorts of into ufo’s and stuff…then again, the same goes for bigfoot, the easter bunny, and Santa claus.
Personally, I think this movie came out about ten years too late.
Kind-of-spoilers and at the bottom super-spoilers. Stop reading if you don’t want them. I hate the spoiler boxes. They are visuallly repulsive to my tastes. I’ll just have to rely on everyone’s ability to read.
The explanation sucked in the book. I mean really blew. The payoff took all of three sentences. It blew. Throw away explanation. The sci-fi equal to Bobby in the shower. Think “thought screens” and “luminous” shapeshifters. It wasn’t made clear as far as I could tell, the crash could have been intentional (an illusion basically) or real. The whole thing could be a thought screen. probably not but they never explain exactly the nature of these things (the aliens).
"Sometimes we’re pure energy and sometimes we are these bug-eyed alien thingies, and sometimes we’re spaceships, and sometimes we’re images from your thoughts and we came here to study you and found that we had lost our ability to tell right from wrong, so we bred it back into us by taking really aggressive humans, breeding them with half and then quarter aliens over 60 years, and now presto, here is this magical little girl. You want her? Cause we’ll take her. She knows right from wrong and she can be a shapeshifting thought screener if she wants too. But if she wants to stay we’ll let her (cause now we know the meaning of christmas . . . errr . . . right from wrong) and we’re off.
The moral of the story is if you don’t know right from wrong kidnap and force breed another species people and you can create good witches and teach a whole alien species how to love. Don’t forget to use wierd math equations and highly aggressive kids for breeding.
Blech.
DaLovin’ Dj
Mrs. Plant instigated watching it in the Plant household.
Last night she remarked “I’m just waiting for something to happen.”
Maybe tonight.
So far, so slow. Thus far, for me, the most exciting part of watching the first two episodes was that there was a commecial last night declaring that the sci-fi channel is going to start showing Roswell in January. It’s about time! Back to Taken I haven’t read the book, in part because I’ve only know there was a book for a couple of weeks. I’m hoping it gets more interesting, but if not, oh well, I’ll just tape over it.
I’m really confused by the kids ages. Jesse is only around 12 at the end of part 2, right? (he was a baby in 47, and part two ends at new years 58) So why does he look 14 or 15? And how old are Sally’s older kids? I thought that they were probably about 11(boy) and 13(girl) in part one but in part two she seems to be in college still and he seems a lot older than 22 or 23. I think there’s supposed to be a family tree on the scifi website, maybe that’ll help me figure it out.
One thing I didn’t get was whether or not Steve Burton, “Russel?” (of GH fame) actually caused the Roswell Alien ship crash. I mean he shot up a room full of aliens, and four dead aliens were found at the site so…
I realize this might not be the case because:
Roswell happened in 1947, two years after WWII ended (thus he wouldn’t be making a bombing run.)
None of the aliens had bullet holes in them (unless it was bad CGI.)
My question then becomes: So what if he killed a bunch of aliens? How did they escape then? His dying crewmate indicated that he was a hero and that he saved them, but if the ship didn’t crashland or anything how exactly did he save them?
I presume the answers will be revealed in time, but how did the book answer it?