Artifam

How I managed to stay the course of season 1 is as great a mystery as the invading aliens' psychology but to hold your attention here I'll quickly state that season 2 was a marked improvement. The first instalment was painfully slow and devoid of any answers to the multiple layers of questions that arise from the unstoppable yet actually more stop/start invasion that is engulfing the planet. The characters are diverse, interesting 'enough' in their backgrounds, but erratically annoying at times, doing and saying stupid things. That said, there's a lot of original intrigue applied here to an otherwise hackneyed sci-fi concept with nice ethereal rendering that feels, or at least looks, reasonably plausible. Overall its plus points ultimately weigh up against its faibles. It's just a shame that sluggish direction and unrelatable character behaviour weren't remedied in the script or cutting room for the sake of viewing humanity.

Don't let the average rating dissuade you, as this is a worthwhile watch, especially for all fans of Flanagan. Despite its early heavy foreboding and very eclectic mix of story-telling, this is a very humanistic tale at heart. The character back stories are creatively built and acted with emotional conviction and with less camped-up flair as in Flanagan's 'Fall of the House of Usher' for example. However, the pace is a little off here and episodes can meander a little too much with an ending that leaves some questions unanswered. A second season was sadly cancelled but Flanagan's synopsis is available for those seeking those answers, if you didn't guess some of them yourself. Nonetheless The Midnight Club as a limited series works on the whole and offers an addictive cocktail of horror, humour and humanity that leaves you with a warm feeling rather than chills down your spine.

More than two decades on from the release of this sci-fi offering the bar has been raised ten fold. The Martian leaves Mission To Mars in the dust for one, albeit trumping science over fantasy. But this feels achingly dated whichever way you look at it. The acting is as lacking in life as the Martian soil and the soundtrack sounds like something out of the 1950s, which instantly evokes B-movie status. The concept is reasonable, but the execution is long and drawn out making it look like a tasty a rye bread sandwich but with a crappy processed meat filling in the middle in the form of boring meandering plot lines. The finally segment does finally get back to complete the circle of initial intrigue that the film initially tantalises with, but given the advancement of CGI (and indeed the move away from reliance on it these days) the big encounter is cringe-worthily laughable and undoes much of the progress that the film finally manages to claw back. To its credit, it manages to wrap things up neatly with an ending that's not terrible, but could've been better if the storyline was less flabby and superfluous and if the acting and score were less cheesy. That much older sci-fi movies still stand up to the test of time makes it pretty inexcusable that Mission To Mars isn't (or wasn't) better.