Glass Menagerie

I Could barely get through the first episode. It was incredibly trite, basically a collection of sci fi tropes. I don’t think there was a single scene I hadn’t already seen a superior version of in another film or series. Very hard to care about the cartoony characters. The Protagonist’s family has no chemistry. The ship when it was in the sky was cool, but the crystal thingy it made on the ground didn’t interact convincingly with the light in the environment, so it just looked like bad cgi, a visual mess. The communication expert trying to talk to aliens has been done to death in a zillion movies. Looks like they are going in the “close encounters” direction for that part. Did I say the science is bad? It’s pretty bad. They drop a few solid bits... but the conception of dark matter is confused. If they can create such virtually human AI, why send humans at all? A lot of apparent holes like that. I guess the fall out of the mutiny drama might do something interesting... my hopes aren’t high. I kept waiting for “the good part” that would reward me for enduring the hackneyed “character development”... but it wasn’t found in the first episode. If it gets better, I’ll come back to amend my review... if I don’t... it didn’t get any better. Dear god this dialogue is awful. Are people really this boring? *** Episode 3. Still trite and boring. There’s a mysterious illness on the ship... and they are going through a treacherous asteroid field, because of course they are. Ooo girl-fight! Finally a good part! Uh... canceled out by the super dumb bar trivia scene. I think I’ve determined that the lady playing the captain has the highest level of acting chops. She’s making the best of it. Oh... that one girls nervous system popped out... I kinda had a feeling they were moving towards an “alien” thing... but I guess they put their own anti climactic twist to it. Oh... there is something on board hunting them after all, I guess we’ll see if it’s girls mutated spinal chord or some new thing we’ve seen a variation of elsewhere... oh, they sidestepped into a matrix/inception meld. Anyway, you get the idea.

It's enjoyable. I haven't watched the series all the way through since I first ran across it in the late 90's.. so that may help my impressions. However, I think the portrayals are interesting and engaging.. it doesn't feel like there was an over emphasis or embellishment of any of the narratives that might have been seized upon to drive a political narrative, as some feared... and in addition to Cho coming through as spike.. I also enjoyed Faye and Jet, particularly Jet. It's hard to please with such an adaptation... be too much the same thing and people criticize for not innovating enough for it to be a worthy remake... flourish too much, and people complain about deviations from the source. I thought this was a dang decent effort at a middle gound, and I hope it is popular enough that they get to finish out the series. These are fun, evocative stories, and not everyone is a fan of Anime. This redux makes this art accessible to those who may have never otherwise been exposed to it.