[July 01, 2011] The Miami Herald Glenn Garvin column Tweet Jun 17, 2011 (The Miami Herald - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- The most difficult problem in reviewing Steven Spielberg's new alien-invasion series Falling Skies is figuring out which of his previous works is best used for malign comparisons. Is Falling Skies a collection of outtakes from War of the Worlds? Is it E. T. with a mean streak? Saving Private Ryan with lizard-bugs? The answer is all of the above and less. For years, Spielberg has been making family dramas adorned with the trappings of other genres, each time with a little less to say. And with Falling Skies, in which he stumbled into the epiphany that the conquest of the Earth by genocidal space insects would not only mean the extermination of the human race but -- gasp! -- also the end of childhood innocence, he has bottomed out. At least, let us hope so. Fervently. Devoutly. Desperately. The problem is not that Falling Skies is unwatchable. Far from it: Following a band of human guerrillas engaged in urban warfare against an occupation army of slimy space aliens and their robot war machines is great adventure, as long as you keep plenty of tissues on hand to mop up the IQ points dripping from your ears. Falling Skies, which debuts with a two-hour episode, starts about six months after an alien attack has reduced much of the world to rubble. The invaders, who look like six-legged versions of that thing that's always trying to eat Sigourney Weaver in the Alien movies, have also unleashed an electromagnetic pulse that has disabled virtually all modern communications. The aliens and their death ray-equipped robots stalk the Earth's rubble, enslaving any surviving teenagers and children they find and exterminating everybody else. What little human resistance is left is carried out by insurgent groups of civilians molded together by the few surviving military veterans. Their ambitions are few and modest: "We're gonna split up. We're gonna run. We're gonna hide, and we're gonna survive," explains one commander as he breaks his army into smaller units. The second in command of one of those units is Tom Mason (Noah Wyle, ER), a former Boston University professor with a vast command of military history and a blood feud with the aliens: They killed his wife and enslaved one of his three young sons. But the professor's lack of combat experience or military discipline constantly puts him at odds with his commander Weaver (Will Patton, The Agency), who regards the civilians the unit must protect as a useless burden. Mason faces domestic pressures as well. His two remaining sons (Drew Roy of Secretariat and Maxim Knight of Brothers & Sisters) want to put down their skateboards and pick up AK-47s to fight the skitters, as the aliens are known. Meanwhile, his nascent romance with widowed pediatrician Anne Glass (Moon Bloodgood, Terminator Salvation) is stymied by survivor's guilt. The trauma inflicted on families by war is one of several recurring themes in Falling Skies that easily ought to resonate with viewers at a time when U.S. forces are fighting in four Middle Eastern countries: The collision of religious faith with massive tragedy ("I wonder if the skitters have a god," one orphaned teenage soldier bitterly asks a devout Christian survivor); the tension between security and civil liberty (when the humans capture a skitter, there's no shortage of willing torturers). Instead, every attempt at treating a Big Idea seems sophomoric and irritating. Even in its look, the show lacks the elemental rawness necessary to throw its intellectual conflicts into sharp relief -- its supposedly blasted urban landscapes seem like nothing a couple of suburban soccer moms couldn't set straight in the time between dropping the kids at practice and afternoon martinis. And the script's crude characterizations, blandly pedestrian dialogue and insipid pop psychologizing make Falling Skies play like one of those big-bug sci-fi matinee flicks of the 1950s as rewritten by Dr. Phil. If a good guy is in the same room with a bad guy (or bug), rest assured he'll turn his back at exactly the wrong moment. If a character is shot in the leg with an automatic rifle, don't grieve; he'll bound to his feet in the next scene, ready to run the Boston Marathon if only those damn skitters hadn't canceled it. The B-movie resilience of the characters, unfortunately, does not extend to the poor actors who must play them. Falling Skies' cast appears unconvinced and unconvincing, shuffling listlessly through any scenes in which something is not blowing up or being death-rayed to bits. The single exception is Sarah Sanguin Carter, who memorably played a ruthless young Stanford law-school grad opposite James Woods a few years ago in Shark. Here Carter is a hard-bitten survivor of not only cancer but also captivity by a motorcycle gang, and she is not cowed by mere bugs, no matter how well armed they may be with death rays or death cliches. To see more of The Miami Herald or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.herald.com. Copyright (c) 2011, The Miami Herald Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For more information about the content services offered by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services (MCT), visit www.mctinfoservices.com. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]