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There's magic in [The River]. Evil, evil magic.
SniperGuy
SniperGuyGamingRegistered User regular
SniperGuyGamingRegistered User regular
New from ABC: The River!
Starring: These people.
Shot like a documentary/reality show, the show essentially chronicles the journey of a family and camera crew trying to find their personal Steve Irwin, who went missing six months ago. The show opens with the crew discovering that his beacon had been set off and they go to attempt to find what has become of the man they loved. Of course, when they get to the beacon, all hell breaks loose.
The first two episodes are currently up on Hulu and the first episode was quite a fun little scarefest in my opinion. It feels very LOSTish to me so far, with a massive slathering of Paranormal Activity. It even has a
What do you guys think?
Starring: These people.
Shot like a documentary/reality show, the show essentially chronicles the journey of a family and camera crew trying to find their personal Steve Irwin, who went missing six months ago. The show opens with the crew discovering that his beacon had been set off and they go to attempt to find what has become of the man they loved. Of course, when they get to the beacon, all hell breaks loose.
The first two episodes are currently up on Hulu and the first episode was quite a fun little scarefest in my opinion. It feels very LOSTish to me so far, with a massive slathering of Paranormal Activity. It even has a
smoke monster!
Definitely feels like the show has potential, but with only two episodes, that remains to be seen.What do you guys think?
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Also, the doll tree parts were really bad at framing the inevitable scare. Except when they all dropped; that one caught me by surprise
It did leave me wanting more, and I'm curious if this will follow a ''threat of the day" while they search for Doc Emmet. Also, as fast as the body count goes
3DS FC: 4699-5714-8940 Playing Pokemon, add me! Ho, SATAN!
Well, that's....certainly interesting.
Pretty sure that would've been more effective at night, though.
Also, ABC is notorious for fucking over its shows...so I am not holding my breath that this will survive.
I enjoyed the pilot, though.
that guy in the back is on the catwalk or something.
I like large casts, but sometimes it seems a lot more like they throw a bunch of people on a premise and figure out what to do with them only after they've got em.
Also, for being the brainchild of a guy who directed a terrible but surprisingly effective horror movie (Paranormal Activity), it's unfortunate that this show has such a poor sense of how to build scares. If you're going to do blatantly CG bullshittery like the "glitterwhoosh" evil spirit in the pilot, you have to at least build up to it with smaller, more realistic scares, the Paranormal Activity equivalent of "door moves on its own". Instead it jumps almost immediately to the PA equivalent of "CG demon goes berserk". It completely prevents you from getting in any sort of mood to be scared.
(Not surprising at all is that the brainchild of the guy who directed Paranormal Activity is shot exactly like it, ie., poorly. It's not particularly unclear, just really really unartistic, even for television, and especially for post-Sopranos expectations of serious dramas and sci-fi/horror shows. I don't expect the show to realize that beneath every reality TV cameraman beats the heart of a film student, but I do wish it would shoot its actually pretty cool production design in a way that made it look real and not like a damn set.)
Other problems: the characterization is nonexistent, which is actually huge with horror. I'm going to be way more scared when somebody I care about is alone and hears a door creaking than I will when a 7-headed undead monster jumps up and vomits blood all over somebody I couldn't give a shit about. So far we have a whiny son who hates magic but immediately believes in it after half an hour in the jungle; a wife whose motivations were spelled out like words on a Scrabble board; a series of one-note non-entities (there's the slimy "My first career was with Weyland-Yutani" producer, the growly Shooty McGunface, the sassy black guy, and "glasses"--oh, and the mechanic whose only character trait is that his daughter is also a mechanic, which is her only character trait besides "refuses to speak English because she hates the audience"), plus the zero-note (not even "plucky") love interest conveniently also looking for her father, who has as much character as she has chemistry with the whiner.
So until they get some development, I will be rooting for them all to die... oh, wait. There aren't even any cool villains to root for: 2 out of 2 episodes so far feature invisible spirits. Which is even more ridiculous because they kept describing non-invisible things: "vampiric monster takes the form of dead crewmember" would have looked great and been much scarier than the "glitterwoosh", and, while the doll tree was suitably creepy (if again, poorly shot), the drowned ghost of a little British girl would have been the perfect horror touch to cap it off. It's as though they're so determined to make horror out of nothing that they forgot they have the money to get "something" now. Anything. Please?
Anyway, I might as well give it the length of the season, as I've watched 25% of it already. If it delivers real character development and some actual non-spirit monsters I might watch after that. Or if alternate-universe-Steve-Irwin shows up all Colonel Kurtz and tries to kill and eat his family, that would be cool too.
Granted, neither of those shows were successful, but they sure were entertaining.
I agree with most of that, but I can defend the scares not being up to par with paranormal activity because it's airing on ABC during their last prime time block. There's only so many envelopes you can push before the censors take hold.
Also, I liked the found footage aspect, and it honestly looks like they've combined it with either a more stable platform for the cameras or some normal shooting styles to not make it as jarring and potentially nausea inducing as normal found footage movies, which due to the nature of rapid movement can only appeal to limited audiences.
For instance, my wife can't watch Cloverfield. She'd vomit urvurywhere. However she handled this fine.
I like how there's people standing in water, but their pants don't look wet.
I haven't watched The River yet (I've got it DVR'd) but I can't think of anything in any of the Paranormal Activity movies that wouldn't make it past network TV censors aside from the odd (very rare) curse word. They're creepy, but nothing ever happens that's really censor-worthy. I'm pretty sure that even network TV wouldn't censor a creepy movie just on the sake of creepiness. Even (PA1-3 spoilers)
My wife has that problem as well, but I think that movie-makers in general have moved on from the whole shaky-cam thing. Paranormal Activity 1 was particularly bad in the daytime scenes, as was Cloverfield; I can't think of any movie in the last few years that have been anywhere near that shaky. PA3, by comparison, was shot probably 90-95% with cameras on tripods. I'm pretty sure that during that brief period where people were in love with shaky-cam they were purposefully shaking the cameras, because even standing-still scenes in those movies shook like they were being filmed by someone having a seizure.
As CptHamilton said, PA isn't scary because it's gory or violent; it's very effective at making scares out of small, family-friendly things like noises, doors opening/closing on their own, mysterious footprints and the like--the preliminary scares that The River ignores (along with character development scenes) in its rush to find a separate Big CG Bad in every episode. Even in terms of the climax, in the first episode I would have preferred a bloody, spirit-possessed zombie corpse, but it doesn't need to be any more gory than, say, a Law and Order episode. It just needs to back off the pace a bit, give us some low-key creepiness, and make us care about the characters.
Ghost Hunters, for instance, is way creepier than most of The River, and 90% of the time they just wander around hearing voices. Sometimes a door closes. Horror works on scary atmosphere much more than it does scary content.
Probably the scariest thing in any of the Paranormal Activity movies is the heavy static noise that presages all of the...er...paranormal activity in the movies. You know something potentially creepy is about to happen, despite the often relatively benign settings, and you're just waiting for something to jump out and scare you. But the PA series are some of the very few examples of effective atmosphere-building horror that I can think of in the last decade. Those, Insidious, and some of Guillermo del Toro's stuff. It's not really surprising that they didn't do it for TV; my impression of TV executives is that they'd demand you put the monster(s) in episode 1 because otherwise people will be disappointed and not tune in again.
I think their equivalent of the "shit's about to go down" noise is that scratchy video distortion. Not quite as effective yet, but maybe after a few more episodes of Pavlovian conditioning...
It's a shame, this had real promise up until about half way through that first episode when everybody just accepts Jim has become an evil ghost. Playing up the angle of it being staged for TV (both for the viewers and characters) or possibly angry drug dealers would have been a much better idea.
I would be all over that.
This is the worst photoshop job I've seen since Gordon Brown started smiling.
It would likely have to be done elsewhere.
I hate that I come on these TV show thread just to complain, but my god. I think the Syphilis (Sci-Fi) Network would do a better job. Towards the end of the seocond episode, did the mother
I saw it long after the fact so I don't know, but it was great to watch with friends and then argue about.
I wish I'd seen it live due to the whole community aspect of the actor's not knowing what was going to happen one week to the next (and their contracts meaning that they weren't sure if they were going to die or not)
This episode wasn't scary, but it also didn't have a whole lot of hokey drama. Plus it had two good drama beats:
I consider it an improvement that they came up with actual monsters, as well, even if they used them too soon. I'm sure they'll backslide next week, however, which looks to be about BEEEEEEES, which haven't been used non-stupidly in a horror movie since Candyman.
Edit: Also, I realized why the found footage format isn't working for me here, and it's because they have too many fucking cameras. Found footage is good because it limits you, and limits are great for inspiring creativity. They also tend to unify and express cinematic space really well, because each shot prompts you to consider the camera's position in the scene. That might be one reason why it works well for horror--the conceit calls attention to the space outside the frame, encouraging you to use your imagination and ask what you aren't being shown.
The River, though, has a bajillion cameras, even when it doesn't really make sense ("I'm quitting! And leaving! But I'm going to keep carrying this heavy camera I complained about before!"); so they aren't limited at all, and when we're not being shown something it's because the filmmakers are being coy and/or dicks. And cutting rapidly between a half-dozen angles just totally destroys our conception of the space.
Also, the "this is the footage they left behind" opening title card thing is okay in a movie, where the ending can be "and then they all died and/or vanished" without causing too much consternation. I'm not sure how happy I am about realizing that at the end of this television series, all of these characters will meet a grim end. I mean, most of them, yes. But AJ's kind of growing on me.
that monkey terrified me.
there are many things i would do differently if i was the director, but that doesnt make this show terrible.
i'm excited for it weekly to see what the new creepy thing is.
i don't have the passion for this show to debate the entire thread of hate though.
EDIT: I will say though, as someone who works in television, this is the first show that I think does "found footage" very well, all things considered. they immediately set up that they have a helicopter camera thing, which justifies all the establishing overhead shots into existance.
and for a reality show, there is a massive fuckton of cameras. all over the place. in every room, all the time. in the first episode the first thing they did was show them find the control room (which looks exactly like a control room), and turn on all the cameras. so bam, instantly explains how they have cut-aways of everyone all the time. and these angles never change, because they're mounted, and it was extremely consistant.
and then in episode 2, out in the jungle, the showed the crew affxing all the cameras at the camp, just as they would in a real production. granted, its a tv show so it happens way faster than normal, but they have done a really realistic job of the amount of cameras and footage that get collected doing reality shows.
i have a bigger problem with shows like Modern Family who do the interview format thing (for what? Is this a documentary? Who is this for?) than I do with this. it was shown and explained right away.
But the episode as a whole still felt better, partially because the new guy has more development than any of them so far. (Can you count the character traits? He's ambitious, deceitful, self-serving, can operate a camera, likes French girls, something of a daredevil, has malaria. That's like 5 more than anybody else on the show.) It was also really nice to see the crew doing things besides screaming at each other or running in terror, like rocking out to some Decemberists or preparing for a storm.
Either that, or I've got the Stockholms. Any opinions?
Btw: It's taken them 4 episodes to realize they should listen to the girl who knows all the local legends. How long will it take them to realize the running theme here is "Don't piss off the natives"?
I'll still watch this, if not for anything but the setting, but I'm hoping for better from this next episode.
3DS FC: 4699-5714-8940 Playing Pokemon, add me! Ho, SATAN!
It's taken 4 episodes for ONE GUY to realize they should listen to the girl. The rest of the people on the boat were still blowing her off.
After watching the last episode, I think I have found my favorite character in the series. The Jungle. I can't wait to see what phenomenally stupid, thoughtless, or selfish thing the people do next to rouse it's merciless voodoo justice.
Which would actually be a perfectly fine thing to do in a horror movie--see "The Serpent and the Rainbow", for instance, or in a very different setting, the great "Don't Look Now". The problem is that a story in which perfectly justified supernatural forces punish the protagonists for their moral failings only works over a short period of time--a television show requires characters we can root for, at least in some fashion (even Tony Soprano was fun to be around sometimes), or there's no point in sticking around.
Which is why I can't figure out why I can't stop watching it every week.
The more I look at this image, the harder it is to notice anything but the guy in the middle with his hand on his hip, like he's giving the camera some sass while rocking a fanny pack. Everyone else is being all serious and here's dude. Is he pouting? I think he's pouting, there.
I get the sense that they kept being told another person had to be in the shot, and these extra people became increasingly clumsily added. The guy in the glasses and the sports jacket(?) is so far in the back, it barely matter he's there. The boat has a better spot than him.
Don't take them on the river, they'll get wet.
Not if the people in that promo photo are any indication.
:^:
edit: To add more, got around to watching this week's episode. I'm really starting to like this Jungle theory - so far it's outwitted and outmatched the first crew and these guys.
So stupid end-story theory:
Eh.
I think you just utterly went and nailed it right about there.
That said, still a lot of retardation, from the bizarre plot holes (ghost people are weak against fire? wut?) to disgustingly brazen cliches ("Did you hear that?" "Very funny!" "No, seriously!" KILL ME). Plus a golden opportunity to add some kind of meaningful development/backstory completely wasted in service of more damn emotion. ("Tell me one detail about your father. Anything!" "I can't... think of any... because of how much I LOVE HIM".) Oh, and I'm desperately trying to ignore the "romantic triangle" bullshit they tried to pull. Hanged Dude is more of a character than you, Doctor Mopey, and in this episode he does more for Lena than you've done ever, so shut up and get out of his way.
Only three more episodes left! Which is why it's really bizarre that we still know virtually nothing about the central mystery. I really hope they don't pull a whole "look at this twist/clue! tune in next season if you want real answers!" thing. Because I'll be fucked if I'm going to watch after this season. No matter how fun The River is to rant about.