TV: V Remake

Troy Patterson reports in Slate that a remake V will be screened later this year on ABC. I suppose this is the fate of science fiction shows and movies. Once the high technology of twenty five years ago starts to look dated it makes sense to reboot or reimagine the worlds.

Or when the special effects start to look too cheesy to be cool, it might pay to invest in all that CGI. I can't believe I thought this looked real when I was a kid.



Another reason could be that the politics of yore are just a little too embarrassingly machismo, or the division of the world into good and evil seems unsophisticated. We're all liberal cultural relativists now, relatively speaking, and want our fantasies to reflect those ideas...somewhat.

I'll be curious to see how the remake stands up. The original already touched on the fact that Visitors manipulated us and used the media and popular culture to gain our trust. In a famous scene children play with action figures of the visitors to show how much they had become part of our culture.  These were the same action figures you could buy.  It was at once  a criticism of the brainwashing of commercialism and blatant product placement.

It seems that the series is ticking all the right boxes to be taken seriously. Political and religious allegories, generational disputes, social ills are being woven into the plot. But I suspect that for all the gloss it's just another story of monsters from outer space.