The 4400 - The Complete First Season
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Movie Reviews of The 4400 - The Complete First Season
Movie Review: Heroes meets the X Files
Summary: 4 Stars
Great premise, solid acting, good writing. Good solid entertainment for those who love sci fi and those who aren't so sure. Movie Review: Entertaining
Summary: 5 Stars
This is potentially the best sci fi on telly right now. Partially because everything is gunk. However it is not really bad. I enjoy the melodrama in the series. I keep waiting to see what unfolds next. It is a bit slow. However when all else fails it is better than most programming.Movie Review: Disappointing
Summary: 3 Stars
Let me start out by saying that this is the only "season" I've ever seen (five episodes hardly constitutes a season in my book), so maybe it comes into its own in the second season and does better than what I saw here.
*** SPOILERS ***
I got the first clue that the writers for this show are lazy in the pilot before the 4400 people ever showed up. An object people think is a comet is hurtling toward Earth at 3000km/second. We launch Titan II missiles at it. We watch their trails streak through the sky for 55 seconds until they detonate on the object. Twenty-five seconds later we see the object pass the moon on the way to Earth. Now, what's wrong with this picture?
- The last Titan II ICBM (the ones with bombs in them ;-) was deactivated in 1987. The Titan II SLV was later used as a medium-lift space launch vehicle to launch satellites into orbit.
- The Titan II had a range of 8850 km as an intercontinental missle, and most of that occurred after the engines stopped burrning. If the ball of light was traveling at 3000 km/second and took 25 seconds to get to the moon after the missile impacts, that means they hit it 75,000 km on the other side of the moon, or about 450,000 km from Earth. That's 51 times the actual range of a Titan II.
- The missiles would have to travel at more than 8000 km/second to cover that kind of distance in the time allotted. The distance from New York City to Moscow is about 8500 km. When did we (or anyone) ever have an ICBM that could reach Moscow in under two seconds? In point of fact, the speed of a Titan II was 15,000/hr, or 6.7 km/second.
I'm not a missle expert. I don't quibble with minor inaccuracies. But the notion that we'd launch missles at something on the other side of the moon and watch them hit in less than a minute was so glaringly absurd I went to Wikipedia and read about the Titan II. Now I can quantify just how absurd it was.
So apparently the writer figured we should shoot at it, had heard of some missile called the "Titan II" and decided to add an attempt to blow it up to the story without any regard for facts or believability. Yes, I know this is science fiction, but even in fiction the fictional parts need to be interwoven with reality to make the overall story believable.
On another front, this feels like a soap opera too much of the time for my tastes. When Kyle tells his uncle that he can't remember anything about the night he was abducted, Tom tells him "Don't lie to me" even though *none* of the abductees can remember anything about their abductions. Lily's husband doesn't even show up when the 4400 are released from quarantine. When she goes to see him, he tells her he remarried, lied to their daughter about who her real mom is, and takes out a restraining order against her, which he can apparently do because he's a lawyer and knows "how to work the system." Soap operas are full of jerks like these guys, which is probably a big reason soap operas annoy me.
I could go on, but I'll just say that while the concept is interesting and has some real potential (that might be realized in later seasons), I felt the execution was crippled by weak writing.
The casting is fair, but not impressive. Jacqueline McKenzie is about the only person I'd miss if they replaced her with someone else.
All in all it was interesting, but it didn't leave me wanting to see the second season.
Movie Review: More unhealthy Cult Entertainment....
Summary: 1 Stars
I am tierd of all these second generation X-Files/Men in Black turn them into stupid television programs. The concept is stupid, the acting is very very second rate, the production values are even below Roger Corman's film efforts, and what passes for the story is lots of cheap melo-drama, which is all Cable Television offers....Cheap Melo-drama.Movie Review: Amazing - Simply Amazing
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the most amazing series I've ever seen. There are some clunker episodes, but they are few and far between. From concept to creation, this is a great combination of Human Drama, Sci-Fi, Espionage, and Thriller. The ONLY problem with the first season is that you fall in love with some of the characters who don't come back for the 2nd season. By itself, the first season is one of the best single seasons of any series I have ever seen.