This series' continual allusions to the 60s original make it look like a remake, but it gradually reveals itself not to be. Rather, it's a new story based on the same idea and starting more or less the same, but leading to a different resolution (if one can call the ending of the first series a resolution). The writer seems to have been attracted by the original's artiness and over-elaboration, both of which he emulates, while failing to achieve the same measure of style or wit. That makes his script less entertaining and more tedious. But its largest fault is that the beginning and the end don't match up. If the villain's aim were as stated, it wouldn't lead him to come up with anything like the Village, and his own behavior there, assuming it to be deliberate, seems fatuous. The second largest fault is that the denouement is of the all-encompassing kind that is invoked retroactively to excuse anything the writer felt like tossing in (cf. Life on Mars and Vanilla Sky) but that fails to explain anything in particular, that is, the things the viewer wants explained. It doesn't even manage to explain itself, e.g. how are the villagers kept in the Village, and where are they really, since it's made clear that they aren't all in the same place? The story hasn't been thought through enough. And the production doesn't transform it: the settings are drab, Ian McKellen's 2 is too much of a very moderately good thing, and Jim Caviezel as 6 appears to be channeling Steve Railsback in The Stunt Man, another overlong desert allegory, which the director may have had in mind while shooting this. It's not a bad show; it's just something to watch, in lieu of watching nothing--or, in other words, TV.
Review of The Prisoner
