Mark Riordan

Synopsis: A workaholic lawyer gets stranded in the Alaska wilderness, and ruminates over past events in her life while trying to get back to civilization. Many reviewers have commented on how silly the survival aspects of this show are. I agree with them: the writers don’t seem to have spent more than 5 minutes thinking through the parts of the plot related to survival. But that is somewhat besides the point. This isn’t mostly about survival, but rather about a woman agonizing over injustices and mistakes in her life. There are flashbacks. Many flashbacks. Many, many flashbacks. Many, many, many flashbacks. There are more flashbacks even than uses of the F word. (If the writers plan on using the character Liv again, I suggest they first send her to stevedore camp, where she can expand her vocabulary of expletives.) The plot moves along OK for the first episode or two. But after that, it slows to a crawl, indulging not only in the above-mentioned flashbacks, but also in discussions with imaginary people. It’s slightly hallucinogenic, and not in a good way. The weird thing is that the family experiences which have traumatized Liv so much really don't seem too bad to me. Conclusion: There are certainly better programs about survival (e.g. Alone), and very likely better programs about agonizing over one’s childhood. I’d stick to those, and give Keep Breathing a pass.

I felt that, even for a sci-fi movie, the basic assumptions were overly ridiculous. Now, having a stupid premise is not a deal-breaker for modern cinema, but in order to pull off, you need to have a sense of humor about it - which was not the case here. Even worse, the movie spends a fair bit of time trying to justify itself with many long, boring scenes (academic lectures, etc.) filled with pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. Not only are these scenes unconvincing, but they are boring. Although some reviews refer to the film as "mercifully short", I felt that the film would have been even more mercifully short if those lectures and other nominally educational scenes had been removed. I was puzzled as to why Morgan Freeman, a successful and well-respected actor, would agree to take such a dull role in a dumb movie. I wondered whether he had had an unfortunate financial setback. I guess I’ll never know. I was dumbfounded when I learned that Lucy was actually a very successful film at the box office, making over 11 times (!) its budget. So your mileage may vary.