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Nerd Alert! August 11, 2007
He'll Bore Every One Of Us Sean should probably get his own website or blog like us cool guys, but if he did then I wouldn't be able to post his angry emails to me, thus saving me from doing a lot of the same complaining. Sean didn't like Flash Gordon on Sci Fi. He's [a braver? More patient? More tolerant?] guy than I am because truth be told, I couldn't make it through the entire 90 minute pilot. I echo all the stuff he says below. The show was the opposite of good. Flash Gordon doesn't have to be Battlestar Galactica brilliant -- though gosh, fellas, couldn't you at least have tried something lofty and failed instead of just mailing it in? -- it just had to be watchable. And fun. Fun! Is that too much to ask? If I could just pick one of myriad complaints to harp on, it's the casting of Whitney from Smallville as Flash. This guy just doesn't have it. By it, I mean what Chris Jericho calls char-razz-ma. I'd have settled for simple charisma. Sam J. Jones didn't have it either, but he was surrounded by Max Von Sydow, Timothy Dalton, Brian Blessed, Melody Anderson, Topol, and Ornella Muti. And everything he did was bombastically scored by Queen. That combo had char-razz-ma and then some. I have no plans to spend the next 22 weeks with this Flash. But enough of my general complaining, let's hear some specifics from someone who did watch the whole thing: There was a distinct moment when I realized that the new Flash Gordon series would suck: the opening shot of Steve "Flash" Gordon running a marathon in slow-mo. That pedestrian shot instantly revealed both the lack of vision and production value of the show. Nonetheless, I plowed on like a trooper, and watched the whole bloody pilot. A greater waste of my time there has rarely been. Oh God it was awful. Besides the horrible casting, wooden acting and shitty production value/special effects worthy of an early 80s syndicated series, they put no thought into the little things, which was just infuriating. For instance, the show starts of with Flash winning a marathon, which means he had just run 26.2 miles in probably 2 hours and 20 minutes or so. After that, you can't stop on a dime, have a conversation and chug champagne (with remarkably little sweat). He then hangs his first place medal on his father's tombstone, where the medals from his last two marathons still hang. So for two years the groundskeepers at the cemetery just left the medals hanging there and no young punks stole them? And when Flash comes back at the end of the episode and promises his father to dig up the empty box when he finds him and all three medals are still hanging there, why not take them back; he doesn't believe his father is dead anymore so why leave them at his empty grave? Speaking of his father, the guy was supposed to be a brilliant physicist, but what kind of brilliant man creates a rift in space and thinks the best thing to do is go up to it and touch it with his bare hand? And how does "all the knowledge in the universe" fit on a chip small enough to fit in the back of a watch? And how did Dr. Gordon get the chip before he went to Mongo? And if he always wore his watch, why wasn't he wearing it when he got sucked into Mongo? And would it have killed them to tell us which"small college in Maine" Dr. Gordon taught at where he met Zarkov (there are only 3, so there is a 1/3rd chance it was Bowdoin)? It was also amazing that when Flash's mother cooked him eggs, she left them on the grill for all of 30 seconds before there were ready to be eaten. Was she trying to kill him with salmonella poisoning? And those are just the little things. I hated Ming the Charismaless, I hated Mongo and Earth being connected by interdimensional portals that you can just cross back and forth between at will. I hated that the episode ended with Flash back on Earth rather than stuck on Mongo. And it was so painfully obvious that the "Imex" was Flash's watch from the very first mention of the word "Imex" coming close on the heels of Dale and Flash having a non sequitur conversation about that watch. The Sam Jones version of Flash was fucking Citizen Kane compared to this crap. |
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