I can remember in High School when we'd talk about the Holocaust, most students didn't understand. Eventually, we were shown a film about the "blue eyed people" versus the "brown eyed people", but I still don't think that hit the mark on most students.

Along comes the TV miniseries V. This miniseries was aired on NBC in 1983. The premise is that aliens come to our planet with the pretense of helping us out with all of our environmental and medical problems, if we'll just let them use our factories to manufacture a chemical they need.

In some ways, this is so simplistic it's ridiculous. Watching it again, I can sit here and shoot basketballs through the holes in the plot. But that is not the point of this series; it is to show just how human nature always wants to believe the best and how that makes us easy prey by those who wish to exploit us.

For the first twenty minutes, I thought I was watching the beginning of Independence Day; the openings are that similar. Considering this was aired in 1983, that tells you who was copied. As the ships (which look remarkably similar to the ships of Independence Day) arrive over major cities of the Earth, some people are excited while others are scared.

A message is transmitted inviting the Secretary General of the United Nations to come aboard and a message of peace and working together is disseminated.

Slowly, things begin to change. Scientists and those in the medical profession represent a threat to the Visitors (as they have been called) and are targeted with propaganda as well as physical harm. Their families are ostracized in the community and soon they have to register there whereabouts. The Visitors begin a "Visitors Friends" program which gives teenagers certain rights and responsibilities - as well as power.

But the scientists, as well as a few others, begin to catch on that there is more going on here than meets the eye. They form a Resistance to the Visitors and begin trying to find ways to learn what is really going on.

The story is good because it presents this topic in a way that I felt was much better than the "blue eye vs. brown eye" movie that I had seen. After viewing this, I had a better understanding of just how it was so easy for Hitler and the Nazis to take over the government and manage to do the atrocities that were committed with so little resistance at first. Watching children turn in their parents to "get back at them" the way so many teenagers do things without thinking them through thoroughly, as well as seeing the way the power-hungry and disenfranchised embrace the Visitors movement really shows just how easy it is to prey on the weaknesses in society.

For its time, the special effects are magnificent. Even on DVD, I don't see very many scenes where the black matting around the ships is visible. This phenomenon is particularly visible on my Battlestar Galactica DVD, but here it was not bad at all. Even the scenes that use models and rubberized masks look decent on this - as good as many of the current CGI effects in so many movies.

The acting is decent, although many of the actors are names we have hardly heard of before or since. I was surprised when I rewatched it to see just how good they are. Some of them melded into the roles here so smoothly that I had no trouble seeing them as the characters they portrayed. At other times, the dialogue seemed sort of wooden, but I don't know how much of that should be on the actors versus the writers. There is only so much you can do with a bad script, and though I think the general story here is absolutely superb, I think there are times when the writing is lacking. If there is one major problem, it is that too much of the story is told via news broadcasts.

However, this was a miniseries and a long one already. To move the story along, the writers did what needed to be done and accomplished it fairly well.

At close to 3 hours, 17 minutes, this is a long DVD to watch, but it is well worth it. The ending is somewhat abrupt as it leaves you with a cliff-hanger that is solved in the next mini-series.


© 2001 Patti Aliventi


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12