jack daw

Something horrible lands on Sunday night TV...sending out a great fog across the planet to dull the senses. Looked great in the trailer, a visual feast. So much potential for tripedal fun here, bogged down instead by some truly terrible story-telling. Here are some rules: Make us care about the characters. Once we care a little bit, if these characters are fighting for their lives, don't keep cutting pointlessly forward to show them sitting about still alive - if po-faced - in the future. It punctures things faster than a CGI Martian's proboscis. Make sure the dramatic logic works within the parameters of the world created. So if you say 'We'll meet him at our little family place in Sussex,' don't meet him on a beach with loads of ships instead. Or if you want someone to horribly sacrifice themselves so someone else can escape through a little gate, don't make it look as if they could have both strolled through the gate without any sacrificing going on... And if you need to explain to the audience through bald dialogue your theme that Britain's colonial treatment of indigenous people in Edwardian times was wrong, then your story, as a vehicle for articulating that insight, hasn't really worked. And please don't, as part of this didactic summing-up, talk about 'people with brown skins...often with not enough food, but always soooo cheerful, and marvellous brightly coloured clothes...' So, toe-curling at times, and despite looking great, pulled off the tricky feat of rendering alien invasion boring.