I missed the original V miniseries when it was first aired on Channel 10 in Australia. I can't remember why. It might have been because I was out of the country and had missed it in the UK, too, or I might have not watched it through bloody-mindedness. I did watch it on its repeat in the lead up to V: The Final Battle in 1984. I was 16 at the time. My body a site of raging hormones, my brain cramming for exams that seemed life and death at the time, and subconsciously I was trying to work out my sexual orientation. It was a question that was literally cutting me up.
I was also waking up politically, and through the vagaries of family, time and place, I was firmly within the Amnesty International sphere. I had just discovered what had happened on 11 September 1973 in Chile and was stunned by what was continuing to happen in that country's dictatorship. It just didn't make sense that all those things that were supposed to have been unique to World War II were still happening... whatever happened to "lest we forget"?
Aside from books about Latin American politics, World War II (in Europe), and my High School reading list, I was reading the likes of Heinlein, Asimov and McCaffrey. My main TV love of Doctor Who was going through a patch I wasn't enjoying, and Blake's 7 wasn't coming back.
I was ripe for V, and I was duly hooked. I started a fan club and fanzine, both called Visitor Command, which got quite a following. I made numerous penfriends from around Australia and the USA. Some of these friends are on FaceBook, but there are a few others I'd like to catch up with. I had two Visitor uniforms (one for everyday, one for best, ahem), and spent a small fortune on a Visitor mask, which I still have. I wrote earnest articles about it all, and started an epic bit of fanfic. What surprises me most about that is how some snippets are actually readable.
I was seduced. Well and truly.
But let's be clear about what it was that I fell in love with: the first mini-series, most of The Final Battle (lose the "Star Child" plot nonsense completely, please) and the odd scene in the mercifully short-lived series.
To explain for those of you who weren't as obsessed as I, or haven't even seen the original. V was about the seductive nature of totalitarianism, the evil that is done under totalitarianism, and the bravery of resistance against such totalitarianism. The space aliens were just to make it a modern day allegory for US block-buster TV to explore those ideas without getting bogged down into which was worse: Nazism, fascism or communism. (Strictly speaking, Kenneth Johnson wanted to explore a fascist regime taking hold in the USA but NBC/Warner Bros insisted he do a science fiction series).
We start the adventure with investigative news cameraman Mike Donovan and his soundman Tony Leonetti. They're in El Salvador filming a resistance leader make an apparently futile stand against government forces, but the UFOs arrive. The obvious plot point is how the aliens inadvertently save our heroes from being killed in the crossfire, a not entirely subtle code suggesting the new arrivals might not actually be bad guys. A second plot point is more subtle and is picked up again in the second part of the miniseries when there's a shot-for-shot visual nod back to that first scene. It's saying something about (foolhardy?) bravery in the face of impossible odds. It says a lot about the characters involved.
The third plot point is connected with the second and relies upon knowledge about US policy in Latin America at the time. What fascinates me is that Kenneth Johnson didn't choose a Contra guerrilla leader fighting against the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua (the USA was supporting the Contra's armed insurgency). No. Johnson chose leftist guerrillas against the US-backed El Salvadoran government. Why? That would be like the reboot starting with a sympathetic portrayal of a Taliban training camp. Yes. That radical. Why did he do that?
Because the whole thing was about how totalitarianism is worth standing up against, regardless of ideology.
We quickly scoot to Los Angeles via a quick trip to New York. We start to get to know the characters first seen in panning shots reacting to the UFOs' arrival. It's pretty clever TV the way it's shot. It looks effortless, which is the giveaway, and now it's a fairly ho-hum technique. We get more of Mike (and Tony) because they're journalists. Ambitious journalists hungry for more awards. Through them, we meet the even more ambitious Kristine Walsh. The other characters are more haphazard, but it's inevitable most will link up somehow. How else will we, the audience, grow to care about them?
Fascinatingly, though, we don't just get the human complexities of greed-driven matriarch, Mike's mother Eleanor; the black Taylor family of honest blue-collar worker dad (Caleb), successful doctor (Ben) and two-bit crim (Elias); the eager white anthropologist (Robert Maxwell) and his blonde artist wife (Kathleen); the Jewish family; and the gifted blonde med-student (Juliet Parrish). In that era of films like Red Dawn and Platoon where the bad guys are cardboard cut-outs, we get complexities within the Visitor ranks. They're not all power-hungry and sadistic like Commander Diana. We have the kind but cautious 5th Columnist Martin, and the naive drone Willie. And Willie's a drone in the same way as Caleb Taylor the construction worker and Harmony Moore the lunch cart attendant. In V and the obviously Johnson-written parts of The Final Battle, the Visitors had politics. The upper echelons debated whether they should keep up with the pretense or just rape and pillage. The 5th columnists weren't a hive mind either.
On Earth, the beginning of the resistance was ad hoc, an instinctive reaction against the feeling that something that was wrong. That feeling was helped by the disappearances of some of the characters, and a carefully orchestrated campaign against any scientists able to work out the secrets held by the Visitors. Besides, as any student of power-politics knows, divide and conquer is an effective strategy for invaders. Again, the targeting was logical - the Nobel winning scientists went first, then followed progressively down the food chain until our friends are caught in the vice. Media manipulation by the Visitors wasn't ham-fisted so most people wouldn't understand they were being manipulated. Not even Kristine Walsh understood that until it was way too late...
The toys. V had kids in it. The kids clamoured for space toys, especially the little action figures of the Visitors and the model space ships. This was both a comment on the success of the merchandising for Star Wars, but also a hark back to the toys the Nazis peddled of themselves: image of the palatable against the rumours of horror.
The posters were the same kind of deal.
The uniforms.
The original mini-series drew on what is still alluring about the fascist and communist uniforms. The boots. The practicality. The power. Red wasn't accidental, and it didn't just allude to the communist colour of choice but think of the British Red-coats. These guys were confident. Swaggering. Powerful. They wanted to be seen. Resistance was utterly useless.
I wasn't the only one to want a uniform and ended up getting two. Loads of mates of mine did, too, and apparently when the studios began to gear up for making The Final Battle they had to make a load of more uniforms because many had been stolen.
The Visitors' symbol was as clever a marketing ploy as the Nazi swastika. Its design rather similar, in fact...
Amidst all that blatant stuff was a remarkable subtlety. The Visitors didn't kill humans if they could help it. They wanted people alive to either be cannon fodder in a bigger war (never seen) or food (much of which was made of that). Plus, of course, when the resistance actually started to hit, the Visitors had to react. They used torture, conversion, and Diana really was just a sadist who enjoyed conducting mad experiments of the type that would have made Josef Mengele proud.
The Visitors were unable to pass fully as human. They had a weird vocal reverberation and light sensitivity. Instead, the threat was from turned (converted) humans or collaborators. Plus, of course, the imperfections of humans and our own questionable loyalties. One of the more interesting facets of the series was the personal financial gain of Nathan Lane: sure he stumped up the cash and facilities to keep Earth safe, but his moral bankruptcy became a bit of a focus in The Series.
All things taken from stories of real occupation by totalitarian forces.
I finally caught up with the first episode of the rebooted V a few weekends ago. I'd been aware of it and had some trepidation. While I'm a fan of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, to say I was wary of the rebooted V was an understatement. But, I was curious and didn't want to dismiss it out of hand.
You may have worked out that I invested a lot as a teenager in V. I was obsessed. I was a little bit in love with Julie and Diana (be still my confused libidinous subconsciousness), as well as the ideas contained within it. Not the science fiction stuff - that was crud - but the politics, some subtle and some as obvious as the shoulder pads and big hair.
I knew it wouldn't be the same and I was glad for that.
I've only watched the first episode, and I'm aware things might change.
As a drama, it's not bad. We'd only intended on watching a few scenes but ended up watching the whole hour. I'll happily watch it again.
The special effects are good.
The switch to focussing on modern US religion is interesting.
Setting it in New York works.
But, I think they've missed the point of the original. It's more like Flash Forward, 24, and bits of the new Battlestar Galactica. I get the feeling that the characters are being shoe-horned into situations rather than the characters making natural decisions that get them into those situations.
The uniforms are missing. I know there are uniforms, but they're more like those worn by air hostesses - no alluring power there!
The media... I don't have a feel for the anchorman, so his discussion with Anna was odd to me. I don't think it worked. It's like the producers (not writer, nor director, but producers) think that the audience knows the conceit of the Visitors so why bother making it creep up?
But, the thing that makes me most uneasy about this "reboot" is the apparent cop-out of just who the enemy within is. The original worked because Johnson took stories from real human history, mostly from World War II but there are some other human conflicts in there too. The bad guys are just as human as us, despite what they looked like underneath (if you ignore the silliness of the non-Johnson written bits of The Final Battle and The Series). On the basis of what I've seen (one episode; I hope it evolves) it's going down the path of it's the aliens we can't trust, and they're hiding amongst us so that guy we think is evil - aha! He's just a space alien.
Apart from the naive boys. I can't help but compare them to Daniel Bernstein in the original. Daniel was an awkward kid, tolerated by the Maxwells because they were neighbours. A bit of a drifter and certainly not gifted in any obvious way. He's a disappointment to his pretty ordinary parents. When the Visitors arrive he gets a taste of power. He's corrupted by it: the little man with a gun. But even with all the bad he does, Johnson pulls back from making him cardboard cut-out evil. He's far from a sociopath. He gets on the wrong path. I'm not too sure about the two kids in the "reboot", but I'm curious to see if they end up developing at all beyond what seems to be a fairly crude portrait.
Last point is a niggle, but I think it sums up why I actually think the "reboot" shouldn't really claim to be a "reboot" but be a whole other series. The V in the original was the sign of resistance. V for victory. It's Abraham Bernstein, the holocaust survivor, who brings that message to the LA suburb in which most of the action is set. It's that which gives the miniseries its name. The use of a movement in Beethoven's Fifth symphony (which starts with the Morse code for V, which is the Roman numeral for 5... geddit?) and other musical motifs are an affectation. The aliens call themselves "visitors" - small "v" - to highlight their initial lie. They're just visiting, dropping by to say "hi" and not wanting to steal from you, or, er, you. They were never "Vs". And would they ever be called thus? Seriously? If their name was something complicated and long, maybe. But not "visitor"... and I did notice how quite a few characters dropped that laziness pretty quickly (unless my memory's cheating).
Reading this back, it does seem harsh. I am writing a very negative review. But, on other levels the new V is watchable. I am genuinely curious to see how it will develop. I'm just disappointed that an opportunity to do a series that would question the sorts of things the original did has, it seems, been missed. Instead, the new V seems to be taking all the hokey science fiction bits from the original, but at least it is running with them.
And here's a bit of a reminder of what the original was like thanks to the magic of YouTube...
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