Parallels

I saw this on Netflix. Marked as a movie. We watched this with enthusiasm. We really enjoy seeing alternate realities and how people overcome their obstetrical. But this "episode" left the viewers wanting. The end is a total cliff hanger. WITH NO QUESTIONS ANSWERED. The ending even posed more questions than not.

For a show/movie with no adverts claiming future productions, this movie left me almost feeling angry that there was no conclusion. I had to watch something else after just to get over my frustration. Some shows pull off cliff hangers perfectly, this show failed.

If they find funding and fans enough to continue, we'd love to watch it. But, without awful cliffhangers. Great plot and acting otherwise.

I was hoping this would become a series because there is so many possibilities.. infinite in fact, when you go with a storyline of parallel worlds.

The acting was very good. the characters were very likable and cmon you get to see constance wu from "fresh off the boat" with no accent whatsoever. :)

Ill be brief as I don't want to spoil anything but its well worth a watch.. and FOX .. please shop this to the syfy channel or something. though we may be waiting a bit now while fresh off the boat has its run...

I liked the general premise of this pilot/movie very much. That said the characters' construction was incredibly bad, most of them seemed mentally challenged. If this has aspirations as a TV series (and it has the needed basal stuff) nowadays demanding audiences want more realistic characters, they have to find writers able to deliver closer to life personas. The "we have to find mommy" is far fetched giving the reality the characters are set into and also seems directed to children, but that is barely the tip of the iceberg of the many small but hurting failures it has that could've been credible for a show in the '70, nowadays IMHO is unbearably naïve.

It's pretty much Sliders. Timed jumps to other worlds, no (known) way home.

Only it's been TheCW-ed up. In Sliders you had a goofy looking gangly giant, Gimli (middle-later aged bearded professor), a middle-later aged black dude and a petite woman (some replaced later). In Parallels you have four attractive twenty-somethings. In Sliders there's techno-babble and problem solving. In Parallels you just run from stuff and have dramatic moments, usually involving your family. Sliders uses a fixed camera and dolly and whatnot. Parallels uses good ole Shaky- Cam where the camera operator has to deliberately do a bad job, even on tight shots during an exposition scene because that's just the style now.

That said, it's fine. The CW model is simple and it works well enough. And I'm a sucker for a sci-fi premise. The dialogue and situations are cheesy but not cringe inducingly so. Ronan's triangle wasn't good enough to actually put someone to sleep but hey, you could tell what they were going for. It's fine. It's totally fine.

If you have managed to find your way to this review then you already know that this film is not really a film, it is more of a indie production tied to Netflix, intended for a series, possibly orphaned, maybe not, no one knows as this review is penned.

It is hard to review "orphaned" pilots which dead-end. That is a given.

That said, I liked it.

I liked it because it belongs to what I consider the "dirty" sci-fi genre, that is, sci fi produced on such a barebones budget that all the money goes into the human elements while the sets (even in the Earth that never experienced the nuke!) look like they need Molly Maid.

In "dirty" sci fi, the actors are unknowns (which by no means suggests that they are bad) and the FX are minimal, and every now and then you get a scene where you swear that someone ad-libbed a line and they left it in anyway because that was cheaper than re-shooting.

Again, I liked it. It is a refreshing change from the "perfection" you tend to see these days in mainstream TV sci-fi, especially the stuff from Canada, where (they say) getting the lighting wrong when setting a scene is a hanging crime.

In many ways it reminds me of the British series Utopia (not the US knockoff) where interesting characters and good performances drove the show.

Watching, I made a mental note to myself that, if I ever end up in a hub to parallel universes, I would welcome a cute Asian chick popping out of a closet, with a lot of 'tude, and who generally acts like she read the script to the end and already knows how things are supposed to turn out.

Just sayin.