I’ve been watching Steven Spielberg’s 2002 mini-series “Taken”, ever since having recently stumbled across it on NetFlix. Somehow the existence of this miniseries had completely eluded me until now. Maybe because I don’t have a TV.<\/p>\n
The wonderfully zany premise is that all the UFO stuff is true — Roswell, the abductions, the big Government cover-up — all of it. But with the following clever twist: It’s not treated as a big SciFi special effects extravaganza, but rather as a series of intimate small-scale stories of the generations of people whose lives have been affected by these events.<\/p>\n
The confluence of these two opposite principles makes for wonderful fun. Take the most insanely ridiculous premise, and treat it with utmost seriousness in every way. No tongue-in-cheek self-referential winking (as in the X Files), or comic absurdity (as in Men in Black) or superhero wish-fulfilment fantasy (as in Green Lantern). Just straight carefully constructed human drama, focusing on families, relationships, human emotion, loneliness and connection, the everyday betrayals and small revelations that define character.<\/p>\n
It all works spectacularly well as entertainment. And I find myself trying to think of another example of such a thing. An absolutely straight ahead serious and psychologically plausible treatment of a completely laughable premise.<\/p>\n
So far I haven’t been able to think of any others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been watching Steven Spielberg’s 2002 mini-series “Taken”, ever since having recently stumbled across it on NetFlix. Somehow the existence of this miniseries had completely eluded me until now. Maybe because I don’t have a TV. The wonderfully zany premise is that all the UFO stuff is true — Roswell, the abductions, the big Government … Continue reading “Taken with Taken”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7165"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7165"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7166,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7165\/revisions\/7166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}