Reposting my review from the Ex Isle BBS:
It had its moments, but generally I wasn't too impressed. There were too many modern TV-series cliches. It seems every network genre show these days (or at least both the ones on ABC this season) needs to have agents investigating terrorism and to begin with a cataclysmic event.
I felt the story was too compressed; there wasn't any explanation of why there were protests against the Visitors, for instance, and there was too little introduction of supporting characters such as Anna's assistant. And yet at the same time, it felt rather slow-paced and not very engaging until the resistance meeting. Odd for a story to feel at once rushed and uneventful.
The idea that the Visitors have been infiltrating us for years is kind of an interesting twist, and I'm amused by the implication that Bush and/or Cheney (the engineers of "unnecessary wars" and policies that destabilized the economy) were actually alien infiltrators out to destroy us; it kind of explains a lot. But I'm not crazy about replacing Kenneth Johnson's historically meaningful allegory about the rise of fascism with this kind of facile paranoia about an overreaching Them being responsible for all our present problems -- especially a conveniently alien Them that's easy to hate. In fact, the more I think about it, the more that disturbs me. The original V was an allegorical condemnation of Nazism, but this one seems to be built around the very same kind of ideas that the Nazis encouraged: that everything that's wrong with our lives is the result of an inhuman enemy conspiring to destroy us and that militant xenophobia is our only hope of salvation.
I don't care for the way this show has redefined the red V graffito as a symbol endorsed by the aliens themselves. That's historically naive. The V in the original was part of Johnson's WWII allegory -- V for victory was the symbol of the Allies and the anti-Axis resistance forces, and thus symbolized the human resistance in the miniseries. This was even woven into the music of the original miniseries (by frequent Johnson collaborator Joe Harnell), which made use of a "dot-dot-dot-dash" rhythm representing the Morse code for the letter V, which was one of the ways the "V for victory" meme was represented during WWII. (Beethoven's 5th Symphony was used to represent this as well during the war, since its famous opening notes have the same structure -- and perhaps because 5 is V in Roman numerals.) The new series is apparently trying to have it both ways -- the V graffito is an underground symbol of the alien invaders, yet the aliens are the dominant power and it's the humans who have an underground resistance? That's just disjointed. It suggests a lack of thematic focus.
I'm also not crazy about the fact that, even though they changed or updated virtually everything about the premise, they kept the one thing that I always found most unsatisfying about the original: the whole "lizards under the skin" thing. Not only is it implausible on multiple levels (that any alien would be shaped exactly like us except for the skin, that any mask could be that perfect, that more people wouldn't question the coincidental resemblance), but it always rubbed me the wrong way morally, in that it promoted the facile notion that pretty = good and ugly = evil. In the original miniseries, the scene where the Visitors' true nature was first revealed, the mere fact that they looked different from us was presented as something horrific in itself, and the characters' revulsion toward their appearance was treated as an acceptable or appropriate reaction. I always found that a misstep in the original, and I would've liked to see the true nature of the aliens handled differently here.
If I'd been the one to develop a V revival, I wouldn't have repeated the cheesy "They inexplicably look exactly like us and are hiding the fact that they're lizard people" thing. I think that if aliens came along, looked just like us, spoke our languages fluently, and had names like "Anna," yet claimed they'd just met us that very day, there'd be a lot more suspicion that they were engaged in deception. (At least in the original, they admitted that they were adopting Earth names for our convenience.) What I would've had them do was openly admit that their true forms were alien but that they had taken on a human form (through some more complex transformation than just putting on a fake skin over an exactly human-shaped alien body) in order to better function in our world and put us at ease. Then the shocking revelation wouldn't have been anything as simplistic as "Eek, they look like lizards so they're evil!" They would've already defused that kind of base appeal to xenophobia by being honest about that superficial transformation. And convincing people that they were engaged in a deeper level of deception would've been more challenging.
And I still hate the interview scene just as much as when it was previewed a few months ago. It's so damn unsubtle and heavy-handed, the way Anna comes right out and puts into words that she doesn't want to be cast in a negative light and that she's bribing the reporter with the promise of career advancement. There are much more subtle ways those points could be gotten across. I just consider that to be a very badly written scene.
It's too early to say much about most of the cast, except that there are few standouts. Morena Baccarin is certainly effective as Anna, and that really is a good look for her in this role. The only other one I really liked, though, was Alan Tudyk, who's just a guest star. And I rather disliked Scott Wolf as the reporter. He has a high, reedy voice that just doesn't sound like a reporter's voice, and isn't very pleasant to listen to. And I just found him generally unappealing aside from that. I'm also not pleased to see Laura Vandervoort here; I've never cared for her much.
I guess my highest praise would go to the production design on the Visitor ships. Whoever's responsible for the designs has managed to honor the broad strokes of the original ship designs while updating them very effectively. The motherships are more or less round but are very unlike the hamburgerish flying saucers of the original (and in that bit on TV where the sci-fi geek was dismissing Independence Day as a ripoff of earlier sci-fi, it's a cinch that was an allusion to the original V -- though that was in turn an homage to Childhood's End). The shuttles bear an impressionistic resemblance to the original shuttles without looking anywhere near as boxy. But though the designs were excellent, the execution and compositing of the CGI effects looked kind of cheap. Whenever actors were in a virtual set or a digital object (like the levitating apples) was matted into a live background, you could see the seams pretty easily.
So overall, it's a mixed bag. It has some interesting elements and a number of boring and cliched elements, some interesting cast members and lots of less impressive cast members, some excellent production values and some weak production values. Overall, though, I feel that at its core, it's missed the point of V, and what's in its place isn't very admirable.
