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CPetrovich
Reviews
Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation (2019)
Think "Curse of Oak Island" for wing nuts
Lue Elizondo appears to be trying to stretch a handful of Navy "videos" widely published years ago, and which have since been devastatingly explained by Mick West, into a tiresome, repetitive series of the worst kind of recycled malarkey about "UFOs".
The show follows a hackneyed formula of having a group of "experts" (read: people long since out of their jobs which we are supposed to accept were so important that everything they now utter for a "reality" show comes bonded to a guarantee that they're not just either in this for the money, attention or controversy), and these "experts" who stupefyingly insist in every episode that there's more "proof"'just around the corner. And they do things to muddy the facts, just like all those blurry images of allegedly sinister UAPs. For instance, they repeatedly set up the false choice in every episode: that what THEY can't (or don't want to) explain is either the US government, a foreign adversary or alien visitation. No other options. Can't be misperception. Can't be one of a myriad of optical or atmospheric artifacts causing people to believe they see something that isn't there or wildly mistake what they do see. This, on its face, tells you Elizondo et al are only interested in LEADING the viewer to the conclusion they're already making. And who can blame them? The major mainstream media leaped on to the navy videos with all kinds of sensational headlines suggesting they can't be explained. That's simply not true. And it doesn't matter if someone was a pilot. Pilots make mistakes. They get tired. They're influenced by wingmen and cultural biases. Notice how no one thinks what they're seeing are angels? This is brought home by one of the few "skeptics" the producers allowed on the program who astutely points out that people didn't start reporting triangular ufos until after Star Wars in 1977, which...opens with a giant TRIANGULAR spaceship. But I digress.
90 percent of what the series devolves into (should you be as persistent as I was to keep watching in the hope it would redeem itself) are interviews with people who have no physical evidence. Not even bad photos. Just, "I saw something and it has to be from another world". And there's Elizondo, pretending to take notes in a binder. Elizondo, who has yet himself to show one single email or document proving he actually ran the UAP monitoring program, has a hard on for anyone who served in the military. No one, no matter what rank, no matter their job or record (which viewers can't be sure of) could possibly be incredible. It's a given that if Elizondo puts them on screen, they have his endorsement. Unless that's one of the few people who are allowed to appear briefly faintly suggesting that there could be other explanations. But those people are never permitted to have the last word and there's always a flawed rebuttal from Elizondo, who, breathless and puzzled tells the off-camera intern asking questions, why he doesn't believe that he's "wrong". It's so bad and so blatant at points that it's laughable. When one "witness" who's supposed to have been a top navy pilot says that what he saw is either "Independence Day or ET" you know they dispensed with the tin foil hats because they'd throw off too much glare on camera.
Speaking of glare, in one episode Elizondo et al are apparently so confident in their ability to simply lie and mislead viewers, that when a farmer who says he saw some strange lights shows you the video use shot using a night scope on his rifle, it's clear that it's a plane. You can see the fuselage and the wings and the flashing lights. Yet apparently Elizondo and his aging gang of conspiracy theorists never bothered to actually look at it. If they had they would have addressed it. So it's not just bogus and fake. It's bad, to boot.
Perhaps the worst transgression by these wing nuts is the utterance by Christopher Mellon (just way too much to say about his belief system, look it up) when he says "Carl Sagan said extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Well now we have the proof." First of all, Sagan didn't say that. That's another illustration of how sloppy the production is when they can't even get a famous quote right. Sagan said extraordinary claims require extraordinary EVIDENCE. It's called the Sagan standard, abbreviated as ECREE. But what Mellon, for all his money as the impossibly wealthy heir to the Mellon billions, really gets wrong is that absolutely NOTHING in any episode is proof of ANYTHING. Proof would be something tangible and undeniable. What's presented isn't even the requisite EVIDENCE Sagan would have asked for. People saying they saw something isn't evidence of what they say they saw. Not by a long shot. Yet Mellon and the rest never acknowledged the basic and catastrophic flaws in their premise in their little sitcom. Frankly it's appalling that Mellon et al would co-opt the reputation and memory of Sagan for this exercise in stupidity.
Time and time again in this series these clowns stress that it's a matter of national security to know if so-called UFOs are otherworldly because "they pose a threat". A number of episodes allege (without any real references that can be scrutinized) that these mysterious phenomena
have been lurking near nuclear vessels and missile silos. Mkay. So in 50,60,70 years of all this visitation there's not one single verifiable proven, REAL, case of one of these UFOs actually doing ANYTHING to interfere with them. So which is it? Are they a threat? What threat? Do go on. Then there's taking tired old cases shown to have been hoaxes like the Rendlesham forest "incident", and recycling the same old BS for a new audience too dumb to Google it.
Assuming for the moment that Elizondo and these X-fools aren't really this dumb and gullible, as they keep saying they aren't, then - to use their own logic - they MUST be making these episodes to deliberately mislead and confuse. It's been written elsewhere that Elizondo is directing nothing more than an unoriginal psyop to simply throw noise into an arena so people looking for signals will give up or be misdirected. It seems to be working for the media. But I don't buy what sounds like another conspiracy theory.
Elizondo et al simply side step any questions that would have to be at least asked before jumping to a conclusion that it's possible some sightings are from off Earth: how did they get here? Why didn't the enormously dense system of tracking things in orbit down to the size of a screw, fail to detect their arrival in our atmosphere? Why, if they're so advanced, are they revealing themselves in the most clumsy way, as if they're drunk? Why are they all seemingly different in shape, size, lighting, appearance? This is just for starters. But this would be part of the scientific method of studying the phenomena: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Unidentifiable offers neither evidence, nor anything extraordinary. It's just another in a long line of click-baity tv shows on History, a channel that should be renamed Fantasy.
Don't waste your time.
Fringe: An Enemy of Fate (2013)
A potentially great end to a smart series ruined by clumsy writing
Having been a fan of Fringe since its debut, I was sad to hear it was being cancelled. I was particularly bummed because it was shot in my home town, Vancouver. John Noble, Anna Torv and others even did some scenes where I work. The library building was Fringe Headquarters. All in all pretty cool. Until the final half season.
I put off watching it until just the past week or two. The story arc was convoluted and stitched together like Frankenstein's monster. And just as ugly. While a few references - the return to the alternate universe for instance - were a nice touch, the whole "search for the pieces of the plan" turned out to be nothing more than a bogus device to string out the story line. And when you realize at the end that Michael was the key, and apparently knew how the time line would progress, the plot lines in the previous episodes make no sense.
But the kicker for me that left me annoyed and quite certain JJ and crew had phoned it in, was the blatant plagiary of The Matrix. From Peter's Neo slo-mo battle an Observer, to the rip off of the scene between Morpheus and Agent Smith, which simply substituted Broyles and Windmark, even lifting dialogue (I'm infected). That's not homage. It's laziness and hackery.
What some might see as "tribute" when watching poorly scripted echoes of past Fringe phenomenon, I saw as kitchen-sink and last minute. There were so many opportunities to build tension and suspense that were exploited in past seasons. It's almost as if Joel Wyman et al tried to see how fast they could write what should have been the shows most significant and well-crafted episodes.
It's really too bad. There was a canvas to paint a really clever and captivating conclusion to what had been a smart science fiction drama with some remarkable acting. I felt those actors did their best with what they were given to say goodbye to those characters. The writers and execs let them - and the fans - down.