I am also a big fan of the original. My position is biased because I had the opportunity to work with Ken Johnson, the writer & director of the original, on another project so I have an abiding affection for the first pass at this story. That Ken wasn’t involved nor consulted at all is a bitter pill.

Scrambled time lines, faster pacing and CG effects aside, this falls far short of the original. For one - as my 13 year old son pointed out with great exasperation - they’re calling the visitors V’s. WTF? The V - the big ass red V - is the same as used in V For Vendetta and Churchill’s V during World War II - in the words of my son: “It’s supposed to be V for victory you dumb shits.”

The cheap ass universal health care swipe at the Obama administration was as small minded as any of the made-for-tv anti-Soviet tripe that issued forth from the Reagan era broadcast spew.

The leap forward through an excessively compressed time line did little to keep an audience hooked and did much to reduce any believability in the situation or the characters.

Seeing the raid the casting closet of Joss Whedon does not give them the necessary cred for the story they are trying to tell - it’s just an obvious attempt to suck up to the fan base they hope and pray will embrace their efforts.

The original metaphors and intent have been either dampened, ignored or distorted to serve a 21st century American view of post-9/11 politics and distrust of anything that doesn’t embrace jingoistic xenophobic excuses for what is supposed to be regarded as true patriotism.

It’ll be interesting to see how far they think they can travel down that road before jumping the shark with a guest appearance of Glenn Beck or someone pretending to be a kinder, gentler, less annoying version of him.

I reveled in the original production when it first came out - even though I was fully aware at the time of the inevitable lameness of an early ’80’s big hair, wide shoulder pad, overly lit, earnestly acted effort at “high class” TV SF melodrama. It wasn’t Casablanca but it had the cojones to paint the alien fight as an obvious and (seemingly) never-ending battle against Fascism.

A few years after that I found myself working with Ken and had the opportunity to learn more about what his intentions were and how they have also been made manifest in his successive novels which continue the story.

Take away the stylistic and logistic differences between any production from 25 years ago to today and compare the two and it is easy to see this production as a very sad and neglectful attempt at reproducing the success of the original without having anything approaching the heart, passion or clear vision of the original.

Once again I give my young son the floor with his verdict of this first episode:

“That didn’t just suck. It sucked and it blows.”

I rest my case.

Cheers.

I’m already familiar with what’ll happen next from watching the mid-80s V, so to keep me interested this V needed to be of the same quality as Ronald D Moore’s Battlestar Galactica revamp.

But this pilot fell far short of BSG’s in terms of writing, acting (with two exceptions) and SFX which, apart from the teaser you detailed, were extremely poor.