Parallels

I have to give this a 5 because it is unfinished. Apparently it was suppose to be a TV show but didn't get picked up so they made a stand alone movie.. Well, I guess the pilot episode was turned into a movie and of course it has no closure, it just ends. No questions were answered that it poses which is a shame because it was a pretty decent flick accept for a few performance issues and some pretty cheesy dialogue. Other than that, the premise was good, inventive and much darker than Sliders. ohh well. I wondering if anyone will pick up the rest of it and I am just writing more cause it says I have to have 10 lines of review and I don't have that much cause it just ends.

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.

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.

I just finished this on Netflix and I must say it was very entertaining and creative. Obviously the ending is a massive cliffhanger and after reading other reviews and googling it's clear this was meant to be a series.

Well it would be great if this were picked up as an ongoing series but there is another way to complete this if that isn't an option for the creators. It's simple. Two more feature length films that complete the story arc this began.

That gives them room to flesh out the concept, story, characters, and give us some more sweet universe hopping. I specifically want to know what the triplets are all about.

I'd recommend this, buy, and stream the next films/season. I assume many others will as well.

Whoever may read this that has the ability to get the ball rolling I encourage you to do so.

Found this on Netflix highly recommended based on my previous ratings of movies. Watched it. REALLY enjoyed it. Kind of like Sliders meets Lost. But here's the thing--what a total waste. Meant to be a pilot for an entire series, the "movie" so prematurely ended that not even a single mystery was explained. I'm guessing that FOX, once again, gave the axe to a promising series, but enough was filmed that someone just said, "screw it, make it a movie." The pilot is really really good. As a movie, it really really sucked. You can't just write a screenplay for a pilot and call it a movie, it doesn't work like that. It's too bad, because this is a series that I would really love to watch.