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Review: Once Upon A Time
Sep. 29th, 2012 06:51 pmOnce Upon A Time is what happens when your network loses talks to adapt Fables to television and decides to make its own fairy tales-in-the-real-world show. This time the fairy tales were brought here by the big bad (instead of fleeing to escape it) and they don't remember who they are. It's... pretty good.
It started off awesomebad, with really painful faux-medieval-fairy-tale dialogue and writers trying to up the drama by withholding key information only to drop it four seconds later. But in episode 3 they got Pam from True Blood to play Maleficent (the witch from Sleeping Beauty) and it was all uphill from there. I'm on episode 8, and it's time for an intermediate review.
Stuff the show does well:
Rumpelstiltskin. Everything connected with him is absolutely amazing.
The Big Bad, Regina Mills/The Queen From Snow White is pretty awesome by episode four. They do a really amazing job conveying that she 1. loves her son and 2. is nonetheless a terrible mother because she doesn't truly see him.
Set design. The fairy tale world sets are clearly CGI, and they looked a bit cheap at first, but they smoothed them out such that the uncanny valley effect makes it look awesome and fairy tale like.
Acting. The actors occasionally struggle with atrocious dialogue, but they often make it work, and are amazing with a good script. Which is weird, because the show doesn't really deserve actors that good. On the other hand, none of the HBO and Showtime porn shows deserve the caliber of actors they have either. It's weird to compare them to Babylon 5, which was such a high concept show with such shitty actors. Has acting as a discipline improved in the last 10 years? Are studios suddenly prioritizing it? I haven't noticed a change in movies, so maybe it's TV acting becoming more prestigious?
Fight scenes. They're no burn notice, but they're substantially better than Game of Thrones, which is bad and HBO should feel bad.
Stuff the show does poorly:
Costume porn. The medieval clothes are often shockingly ugly. Like, rejected from child beauty pageants ugly.
Snow White's hair in the real world. Ginnifer Goodwin is so pretty, why did they have to ruin it with that hair cut? Also, while her fairy tale has been updated to be awesome, her real world persona has the child like innocence and passivity from the original story, and it makes me want to punch her.
The evil queen's adopted son seems curiously unafraid, on two levels. On the mundane: they're so consistent with what kind of bad parent she is that it's pretty easy to predict what kinds of fucked up the kid should be. He is not any of them. His behavior is more consistent with a beloved, well cared for child going through tween rebellion. On the fantastical: if I was a 10 year child convinced my mom was a witch who ripped all the fairy tales out of their homeworld and trapped them in a town where time didn't pass, I might keep my mouth shut about it.
The early episodes are really rocky. If you hate them, don't continue, but if you see a glimmer of hope, I'd recommend sticking around through 4 or 5.
It started off awesomebad, with really painful faux-medieval-fairy-tale dialogue and writers trying to up the drama by withholding key information only to drop it four seconds later. But in episode 3 they got Pam from True Blood to play Maleficent (the witch from Sleeping Beauty) and it was all uphill from there. I'm on episode 8, and it's time for an intermediate review.
Stuff the show does well:
Rumpelstiltskin. Everything connected with him is absolutely amazing.
The Big Bad, Regina Mills/The Queen From Snow White is pretty awesome by episode four. They do a really amazing job conveying that she 1. loves her son and 2. is nonetheless a terrible mother because she doesn't truly see him.
Set design. The fairy tale world sets are clearly CGI, and they looked a bit cheap at first, but they smoothed them out such that the uncanny valley effect makes it look awesome and fairy tale like.
Acting. The actors occasionally struggle with atrocious dialogue, but they often make it work, and are amazing with a good script. Which is weird, because the show doesn't really deserve actors that good. On the other hand, none of the HBO and Showtime porn shows deserve the caliber of actors they have either. It's weird to compare them to Babylon 5, which was such a high concept show with such shitty actors. Has acting as a discipline improved in the last 10 years? Are studios suddenly prioritizing it? I haven't noticed a change in movies, so maybe it's TV acting becoming more prestigious?
Fight scenes. They're no burn notice, but they're substantially better than Game of Thrones, which is bad and HBO should feel bad.
Stuff the show does poorly:
Costume porn. The medieval clothes are often shockingly ugly. Like, rejected from child beauty pageants ugly.
Snow White's hair in the real world. Ginnifer Goodwin is so pretty, why did they have to ruin it with that hair cut? Also, while her fairy tale has been updated to be awesome, her real world persona has the child like innocence and passivity from the original story, and it makes me want to punch her.
The evil queen's adopted son seems curiously unafraid, on two levels. On the mundane: they're so consistent with what kind of bad parent she is that it's pretty easy to predict what kinds of fucked up the kid should be. He is not any of them. His behavior is more consistent with a beloved, well cared for child going through tween rebellion. On the fantastical: if I was a 10 year child convinced my mom was a witch who ripped all the fairy tales out of their homeworld and trapped them in a town where time didn't pass, I might keep my mouth shut about it.
The early episodes are really rocky. If you hate them, don't continue, but if you see a glimmer of hope, I'd recommend sticking around through 4 or 5.
