Omnium Finis Imminet - For Me, Anyways

The New York Times calls it "Well made, spooky, and suspenseful..." I call it poorly written, droll and heavy handed. Who you gonna believe?

If you haven't figured it out yet, I've managed to catch Hour 1 (of 6) of the new NBC mini-series, Revelations. I wasn't even going to watch it, to be perfectly honest, but my wife had told me that she read some reviews comparing it to The Exorcist and calling it 'great entertainment so we decided to give it a try.

Well, from the get go the show seemed problematic. The series opens with John Rhys-Davies chatting up a class on the Big Bang theory of how the universe came into being, to which one of the students says something like, "Is there no place for God in science?" Oy, if words were cudgels. Still, it's a pilot episode, other shows I've loved have sounded more contrived in their opening minutes, so we continued on.

The story jumps around for a while, introducing characters and setting the stage for the next 5 hours in the show, and doing so with the gentle touch of a bull in a china shop. No cliché is left unturned here as series creator and writer, David Seltzer introduces a satanic cult leader who knows too much for everyone else's own good, an astrophysicist who doesn't believe in God (only science can explain everything), a nun who investigates prophecies (including, at the outset of the show, a Fatima like phenomenon featuring a giant shadow of Christ's crucifixion on a mountainside which shimmy's and moves around at will), a little girl who speaks the word of God (she speaks latin and never took a single class), and a grand prophecy of the coming of the end times that would make Arnold Schwarzenegger proud.

Anyway, Seltzer is not known for his subtlety. He is the writer of films like the original Omen and the Melanie Griffith WWII spy vehicle, Shining Through, so I shouldn't be at all surprised by this. According to SciFi Wire, he was apparently offered a gig writing for Miracles, but found it too formulaic and not the deep challenging analysis of faith that he sought. I guess Revelations was his response to that.

Watching this show was, to me, like watching CSI: The Apocalypse, or something. No opportunity to spoon feed the audience was ignored and no genre cliché was left unexploited. Oh yeah, and Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit plays one of the bad guys.

I may give it one more episode to prove me wrong, but I'm not holding out any hope for it.

mike