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jairzinho
Reviews
ReGenesis (2004)
Decent... but didn't make me hold my breath... like a balloon which never quite fully inflates
I watched the first episode not expecting much. I was surprised that the story was rather enthralling. The actors are OK, if not great. Both Maxim Roy and the rest of the supporting cast are OK, but nothing more - adequate, without blowing my mind. Peter Outerbridge as the main character, geneticist Dr. David Sandstrom is actually better than that. His dogged dedication to his work at the expense of his own life and the people in it is very well portrayed.
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Where the series goes wrong is that they seem to have a lot of ideas, but didn't reject any of them and added them all as plot points which weakens the whole story. For example they got through the first viral scare so fast that by the time the tension mounted, it was already over. From there off to the next subplot and so on. Blowing from one major event to another works in a series such as 24 or Alias where there is always a high level of tension and unexpectedness but doesn't quite fit with this series.
Still I admire the effort of a Canadian cable channel in trying to do what HBO and to a lesser extent Showtime do which is TV programming with a twist from the average drab network fare.
One side I liked is that the whole series sounded and looked very natural with respect to booze. The 15 year old daughter gets a beer and her father doesn't go apes***. Can you imagine a teen on a WB show coming home and opening a beer in front of her dad without that being completely scandalous.
Final score 7/10 +.5 home team (canadian) bonus :)
Spartacus (2004)
the Real Spartacus
Spartacus was of course a historical figure on who there are not that many details. I saw a Discovery Chanel feature a while back which had just the dry historical facts. However, as a figure that has inspired many,(the guy was a favorite of Marx) particularly because its' a story of the oppressed rising against the rich. Therefore many people have taken the skeleton of what's known and added their own fictional meat.
There is an old book by an Italian, Raffaelo Giovagnoli which I read as a kid and really loved. It has Spartacus falling in love with Sulla's wife Valeria, and he has a son and so on. Then there seems to be the Howard Fast book which I haven't read.
Kubrick's is but another interpretation of that story, and a very Hollywood one at that, with the positives and negatives that entails. For some reason, many people on this board seem to associate the name Spartacus only with Kubrick and Douglas and assume this is a remake. It's not. It uses the base of what is known about Spartacus and adds fiction like the girl (by the way, I'm a big Rhona Mitra fan, she is sssmokin'), and the love story and so on. I don't know if that is taken from the H. Fast book or not but if this series is treated as another re-interpretation of the story rather than a remake of the old movie I think people would enjoy it a lot more.
That said, I thought that this series is really well done, as are many mini-series of this kind such as the Dune ones or Merlin. The actors are very solid and many are British which is always a good thing in my book. For some reason there seems to be a rule that in every historical movie the cast has to be predominantly British and they all make sure they speak with the appropriate accent.
Altogether a good 3.5/5 with gusts up to 4.5 depending on how much of a fan you are of a) historical movies; b)Goran; c)Rhona Mitra; d)the strong supporting cast: Macfayden, McNeice, etc.