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Steven Spielberg Presents:
"Taken"
(review posted December 2nd, 2002)
It's certainly nothing
new for Steven Spielberg to offer a tale about alien contact. From Close
Encounters of the Third Kind to E.T.:
The Extra-Terrestrial, that's his favorite sci-fi story to
produce, or even direct. However, can such 2-hour stories be spread into a
20 hour mini series for the sci-fi channel? When the result is Taken
--a
10 part mini-series, to be shown on The Sci-Fi Channel for two straight
weeks-- the answer is a surprising YES. The fact that any channel would be willing to throw away
their entire prime time line-up for two weeks is proof of how alluring of a mini-series
this is.
The premise involves
three generations of three families, starting with the fateful 1947 UFO crash in
Roswell, NM. As this story is told, that crash led to four dead aliens,
with one survivor. The dead aliens come into the custody of a nefarious Army
brat named Owen Crawford (Joel Gretsch), whose obsession to be head of the
research team leads to him alienating his true girlfriend, wooing his
superior officer's daughter (Tina Holmes), and using blackmail to get his new
Daddy-in-law to make him head of the team. Meanwhile, the surviving alien
takes on a human facade (Eric Close) only to lead to a romantic rendezvous with lonely housewife Sally
Clarke (Catherine Dent), resulting in a
particularly gifted son. Both families are linked via the
experiences of WW2 pilot Russel Keys (Steve Burton), whose earlier UFO sighting during a
WW2 bombing
run may have led to a string of abductions for both him, and later, his
own son.
What's going on here?
That's what these three families are trying to find out, each in their own
way. The Keys family deals with abductions, the Crawfords deal with their
"Roswell" investigations, and the Clarke family deal with the
son of the alien and their mother; a human with alien skills, named Jacob Clarke. This leads to a particular tour-de-grace in the second half of
the series, as the third-generation of the Keys family is
"introduced" to Jacob's daughter, resulting in the particularly
gifted young girl, Allie (Dakota Fanning), who may be, literally, the
best of both worlds.
Yes, it's a fantastic
mini-series, without a single boring moment (which, in 20 hours, is saying
a lot). However, one must admit, this mini-series' premise is fighting
against the wind. The truth is, no matter how many Star Trekkies wear
their little rubber Vulcan ears while singing "Row, Row, Row Your
Boat" in Klingon, even they
are a little cynical when it comes to alien abductees. Maybe it's
jealously (why didn't they pick a Star Trekkie?) or maybe it's a former
Peter Pan Lost Boy wannabe who's grown up. Either way, you're likely to
see some very bitter, cold reviews of this series online, from people who
find the concept of crop circles, alien abduction and little gray men
absolute balderdash. It's for this reason that I find this 20-hour epic so
appealing; it acknowledges the uphill battle, and works with it, not
fighting against it. Given how much implausibility there is in the overall
storyline, it is truly astounding how the series grabs your
attention...presuming, of course, you
allow it to be grabbed at all.
Fans of nostalgia will
particularly love the stroll down three generations of memory lane. There
are a lot of authentic pieces of bizarre-yet-true snippets of Americana
here, from the 1950's doc who recommends smoking, to one of many
based-loosely-on-history conversations (in one such conversation, Crawford
ponders whether or not "Apollo 13" was the fault of
aliens). Props, costuming, and every other piece of a movie set worth
mentioning, are all dead-on perfect, for each era. Seeing as how this
mini-series covers 55 years in 20 hours, this was no easy task.
Special effects, much
like other Spielberg projects, are equally impressive. True, the
mini-series wisely keeps the majority of its FX budget for the gripping
first and last episodes, though even small moments in between are well
handled. I particularly liked the moment Allie is walking with one of the
aliens; the alien is clearly made entirely from CGI, which makes it one of
the most intriguing special effects scenes ever made for TV.
Not that Taken
is flawless. For one thing, "bored housewife" notwithstanding,
it seems odd that a 1947 mother of two would so easily have a torrid fling
with a wounded drifter she finds one day in the barn. This is even less
likely, when at times, it seems like these aliens are not as benevolent as
the finale --and the alien drifter-- would have it seem. Crawford comes across worm-like creatures implanted into abductees, that
when removed, lead to madness. Such a discovery would indeed seem ominous to
anyone who didn't know what was going on here, making most of
Crawford's paranoia make much more sense. With
aliens who'd put an insanity-inducing implant in our heads, I found it
harder to sympathize 100% with them. Maybe this was intentional --an
attempt at a liberal "nobody's really the bad guy" message-- yet
I'd have preferred it if the good guys were a little more "good"
here.
However, such flaws can
be forgiven, for two reasons. One, this is the first REAL mini-series
offered in years. After so many years of mere two-part fluff pieces, it's
nice to be entertained in a "series" format once again, for two
straight weeks. Second, even an agnostic alien-watcher must agree that
this mini-series grabs your attention and never lets go. From the fate of
Crawford Sr.'s wife to the fate of Crawford himself, this is heavy stuff.
Spielberg has another alien-visitation hit on his hands. Now, all TV
viewers have to do is find 20 hours of their time to see it.
---Techtite
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