Thursday, September 6, 2012

Lost

Pilot Season
****

A plane crash strands a group of strangers on an uninhabited island, forcing them to come together in order to survive, but the dangers of the island threaten to cut short whatever remaining time these people may have.

Lost is the first series that I ever bought the hype for, and I vividly remember how excited I was the summer before it premiered, gathering any information I could about the series and eating it all up like a kid in a candy store. When the show finally premiered I was blown away, and spoke of literally nothing else through the next two seasons. My interest eventually waned, and I would stop watching the series during it's third season, but I always intended to catch up later down the road.

The opening sequence to this episode is one of the iconic moments of the series, and for good reason: it is a brilliantly handled event. As Jack (Matthew Fox) wakes up in the woods, alone, he struggles to understand what's happening around him, as confused as the audience, and soon finds himself running through a bamboo forest until he reaches the clearing of the beach. The chaos on the beach, with Shannon (Maggie Grace) screaming uncontrollably, inured people hanging from their seats, the roar of the engine as it scatters debris in every direction, is all so enthralling, so real and scary, that it immediately draws the viewer in making it impossible to turn away from the screen.

The music in this series is absolutely wonderful, bringing strings and chords and chimes into the mix to create a sound very unique to this show. After a bit of research I found that composer Michael Giacchino salvaged pieces of the wreckage from the plane used in the episode to make the distinct sound of the tracks heard here, and it's amazing how fantastically everything comes together to make such an unusual and beautiful sound.

Despite the fact that it facilitates an amazing sequence, adding to the chaos of the situation, I just can't suspend my disbelief enough in order to accept that the engine would still be functional after being torn from the rest of the plane. Without contact to the fuel line, I'm fairly confident the engines would have stopped.

All of the wounds sustained by the main characters are superficial, which is fine considering the action they're required to take part in later in the episode, but any cuts, scars and bruises they appear to have are all placed in a way so as not to detract from the attractiveness of the cast. Even those among the characters who are given a noticeable amount of facial scarring remain free from being disfigured for any significant amount of time.

The cast is largely good in this outing, though only Fox is given enough screen time to really shine in this episode. The majority of the cast is pushed too far out of focus during the first hour to make much of an impact, and while Dominic Monaghan's Charlie gives a good performance, a questionable talent seems to be Evangeline Lilly (playing Kate) who seems a little dead behind the eyes, though she may have been playing up the amount of shock that the character likely would have been in considering the events transpired through the story.

Director J. J. Abrams does an amazing job with this story, leading the audience through as great amount of confusion and understanding as the characters themselves, adding flashbacks only to add to the story and flesh out the moments before the plane went down. A great moment occurs on the first night, as the characters hear the disturbance in the jungle, and the camera quickly pans passed the entire speaking cast to create a dynamic group shot that somehow feels completely natural.

Abrams teams with Damon Lindelof and Jeffrey Lieber to flesh out this story, and it is a masterful tale, combining horror and sci-fi elements and adding them to the dramatic moments of this series. The diversity included in this cast is amazing, refreshing, and a great credit to this show.

Lost is a beautifully shot series, captivating in every moment, and the characters are all very real; the mysteries of the story keep the audience coming back, and there really was nothing like it on television when it first appeared. The cast is so large and diverse, both ethnically and regionally, that there are innumerable stories that could be told from anyones perspective, and the anticipation of who might get to tell their story next is one of the greatest treats that the viewer has to look forward to with each passing episode.

Lost is in the running to become the feature for Thursdays. The series ran from 2004 to 2010 on ABC with a total of 121 episodes.

0 comments:

Post a Comment