The I-Land

Plot

When ten people wake up on a treacherous island with no memory of who they are and how they got there, they set off on a trek to try to get back home, only to discover the world is not as it seems.

Cast

Bruce McGill, Kate Bosworth and a whole lot of people you'll recognize but struggle to name.

Verdict

Me and the missus take turns in picking our next show, as mine wasn't out quite yet I rushed and picked this. Whoops! My bad. I quickly brought it up on my phone on IMDB and was stunned to see the low rating. TV shows consistently tend to have higher ratings on average than movies, seeing a very low rated mainstream tv show is rare and this was low!

We ventured in and saw that clearly this had a budget behind it, more than ever I questioned the low rating. Then the mystery begins to unfold, the characters are developed and we saw what we were dealing with and it all became clear.

The plot, concept and approach is very colour by numbers. They played this as safe as they could to generic popular formulas and it still didn't work.

The characters and consistently awful, I'm supposed to be rooting for these people? Sorry, simply can't.

The dialogue is absurd, it's not just that it's poorly written but it's done in such a way that makes the whole thing unbelievable. The way they react to their situation is silly, the way they react to almost everything is dumb.

It plods along like a filler episode of Lost, it's twists and turns are predictable and unsatisfying it's just a very poorly made show.

I'm not one to pay too much attention to average ratings, but wow this one deserves what it has.

Rants

This was advertised as a limited series which I'm beginning to appreciate more and more in this time where everything is cancelled on a cliffhanger. The trouble is limited series need to stay within realistic parameters and The I-Land doesn't, the premise is too big for its runtime and though it could be argued it as an ending (Though an ambiguous one) it still leaves too many questions that needed answering even if the show was pretty dire. Did it need a season 2? Probably. Did I want to have to sit through more of this? Absolutely not.

The Good

A couple of the cast weren't terrible, but I mean literally a couple Nice setting, not original but always nice to see

The Bad

Very weak writing Laughable dialogue Doesn't end sufficiently for a limited series Very generic.

I really wanted to like this show because the premise sounded so good, but the dialogue and acting is just terrible. What a disappointment.

Poor acting, poor direction, and ridiculous dialogue. The characters are completely unlikeable and unrelatable. I don't see this show going anywhere, tbh.

All of the episode titles are quotes from "The Tempest." ("Oh brave new world that has such creatures in it"-in light of the play telling us at once that pretty faces disguise dark hearts.) One subplot of "The Tempest" is that Prospero the magician has a ship carrying a variety of noblemen and courtiers to his island and has them wander around thinking they are alone and tested by various illusions in order to find out if they are good people at heart, mediocre people, or bad people. That's what happens in this series, more or less. Prospero uses a spirit being named Ariel to make this happen, much as two people show up to guide or warn and to watch the survivors. At the end of the play, Prospero makes his decisions. Knowing this makes the series more fun.

After watching all 7 episodes in one day, this made me wonder "what was the point of making this?" This could have had a lot of potential but tried to hard to not be like "Lost" that it comes off as a cheap movie version of Lost. I think all the writers that were fired on Lost all got together, came up with all the ideas that didn't work, found the one executive in charge of programming at Netflix that never saw a single episode of Lost & convinced them to fund it. They even write in some blatant references to Lost in the first episode.

This show could have been done far more enticing things if it had been expanded to 13 episodes. They really could have amped up the mystery of what was happening if they had actual time to expand the whole story. Instead they give away all the mystery by the 4th episode and after that there was no point for the last 3.

Very disappointing for what it is and what it could have been.