Aqui Tão Longe (2016) User Reviews

Mummy! i have a soup of letters, but i cannot make one word with them.

[rebornandgrow · 2 September 2016]

This series was introduced when there's a rerun of "The X-Files" going on - yes, i dare to compare both. No, i'm not talking about budgets, acting, or special effects. Let's see timelines: as far as i can tell, the X-Files had two: the main one, which was about the "golden quest", let's call it this way, of the two protagonists; and the second, which was the unrelated cases that we suppose FBI agents would investigate. Here's the thing: IMHO, the X-Files has the "unknown" as their overall theme. The writers and producers were smart enough to never leave this framework, where you can talk about creepy stuff, fantasy, monsters, vampires, legends, folklore, nightmares, ghosts, science fiction, and aliens, either with humor or with dark atmospheres, but you cannot talk about beautiful girls running on the beaches, cars that are high jump world record holders, or a science guy that with a Swiss knife has an answer to everything. That would be ridiculous. Also, the two main characters may evolve, but they have personalities. Those are the problems of this series that also repeats the two timelines: the writers wanted to talk about so many things, that in the end we couldn't tell what was this all about. Even if accept the suspension of disbelief within the main timeline of the terrorist thing (since when anyone became a family member and starts to live (!) in their very same house all of the sudden just by claiming their past lineage), or completely strange coincidences, most characters are non-believable: we have the super cliché Einstein- level-chemistry-boy, he knows and do everything, the past, the future, and alongside the bad guy, is the only one that can manipulate, and also talks funny with proverbs; all other characters are dumb or almost: the grandfather is a watchmaker that only do watchmaking and wanders around his dead darling; the father is like a thin Homer Simpson with hair; we have the hard- working kid at a car garage, and the hard-working young female medical doctor; the grandmother has a nose and she thinks that something is going on; one foreigner that talks bad bilingual just because; and one girl that talks "awesome". It seems that the writers wanted "to fish" several smaller "targets" for the purpose of audience, because gone are the days when the Public Television in the 1990's and first years of the century had consecutively produced high quality series, that had focus and were well written - this series is neither. Because in a small market, and with private networks specialized in light soap operas, light soap operas can turn into eucalyptus, invading everything, from movies to TV series. Within the episodes, we have the long suffering of dying characters from unbearable diseases (from now on, ER is only about broken nails); the don't- take-too-many-pills-at-once-because-that-is-dangerous episode; the medical doctor having a one night sexual adventure with a gay friend and having his baby; the taxi-driver-homage when there's a massacre in a motel; the corrupting politician (of course!); exploding a tax public service (well, nobody likes them anyway); the mother having a one night lesbian affair, it-was-just-an-experience thing (seeing a trend here?), in one of the most ridiculous out of character episodes i can remember. At a certain point two of the main characters are supposedly killed, but in the next episode one is alive, but we can't tell how on earth she survived (either the writers understood that "killing" such a great actress like Margarida Carpinteiro was a huge mistake, one of the two really believable characters, or maybe i missed something). Apart from the latter, the only other interesting character was the bad guy, and it's a shame that the story was not only about him and his madness, the one and true theme of this series, not terrorism, or economic crisis, or ridiculous love affairs, or drinking, or drugs, or cheating the wife, or unemployment, or corruption, or crime, or death, or revenge, or niche themes that goes on and on and on.