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Critic Reviews
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The entertainment value and suspense of Falling Skies is paced just right. You get the sense that we'll get those answers eventually. And yet, you want to devour the next episode immediately.
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The show, on the model of other epic sci-fi programs like Battlestar Galactica and The X-Files, still has the potential to break ground. But for now, it's telling a gripping, well-made story; it might not be ready to be appreciated as art, but it's impossible not to love it as entertainment.
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If "Walking Dead" weren't alive, up and taking a vacation to generate new blood, Steven Spielberg's Falling Skies would be the best current sci-fi series on TV.
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It's "Jericho" meets "V," with the good from both and the bad discarded. It'll raise the summer-TV bar significantly.
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Pope, and Cunningham's sardonic performance, provide Skies with some much-needed flashes of sharp humor. Ultimately, though, Falling Skies rises above any one performance; it's the spectacle of humans versus aliens that draws you in.
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Falling Skies generates its own excitement, very much worth the ride, like Lost and Jericho, to watch characters develop as they struggle under confusing and life-threatening circumstances.
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Serious without being grim, uplifting without being saccharine, Falling Skies dares to image what feature films will not--a world in which Will Smith or Aaron Eckhart did not bring down the mother ship in time.
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It all adds up to plenty of action and suspense, with heroes we like and villains we can boo and hiss. And the fate of the planet at stake. Who says there ain't no cure for the summertime TV blues?
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When resting between thrilling action scenes, it's all very earnest, never campy or cheesy--but not particularly sophisticated or deep, either. It doesn't really have to be as long as it's entertaining. By those standards, Falling Skies succeeds.
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Hey, it works. Probably because Falling Skies tells a gripping story, full of people whose fate we cannot guess on a playing field whose contours are not yet clear.
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Too often, TV's sci-fi creators fail to give us characters to identify with, focusing instead on special effects and plot manipulations. But the father-son-bond material in Falling Skies brings humanity to the story and grounds it in emotion rather than spectacle.
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Falling Skies, although competently directed, acted and sometimes written, goes off on more than a few tangents and paint-by-numbers subplots of the genre. It's best when it sticks to the main thread, and that's the battle for survival and to learn what the six-legged freaks are doing with the children.
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Falling Skies is exactly what you'd expect it to be, only a very good example of it (and is at its best in Sunday's pilot), and an ideal summer series. For once, Spielberg and company got it right on the small screen.
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Skies has enough going for it to appeal even to those who don't think they like sci-fi.
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The special effects are better than decent and the ensemble cast wears pretty well as Falling Skies begins to hit its stride.
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As is often the nature of such programs, Skies does ask you to accept a lot of clunky dialogue and a few too many easily spotted twists. Even so, fans of the genre can embrace it as a summer-viewing diversion--one that's likely to work even better for younger viewers, who haven't seen all the films from which it borrows.
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The show doesn't have the sinister intelligence of ABC's short-lived Invasion, but it's good family entertainment. [27 Jun 2011, p.45]
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Don't look now, but Falling Skies could be a summer obsession.
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The characters lack the depth of those in smarter, premium cable dramas like "The Walking Dead," but they do show some growth as the series goes on. What Falling Skies does best is create a sense of the struggle for survival.
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Falling Skies' mix of compelling individuals helps to make its early use of formula less troublesome than it might have been. Later episodes develop interesting and diverse motives, as the 2nd Mass begins to figure out what the aliens are up to and how to fight them more effectively.
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Within Falling Skies' limited ambitions is some decent popcorn entertainment.
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Skies needs more horror. Less talk. More dramatic tension. Less (ummm) talk. More crazy, wild shootouts with the despicable aliens, who don't seem particularly bright, by the way. Less (all together now) talk.
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Taken on its own terms, this eight-part series--which begins in the middle, months after aliens have invaded Earth, thus turning a ragtag New England band into modern colonial resistance--has its moments action-wise, but the soapier elements mostly fall flat.
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Yet another dystopian vision with Steven Spielberg's brand name affixed to it (as executive producer), this time as a cheap-looking but occasionally intriguing sci-fi social study called Falling Skies.
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Despite the high stakes of the story and the frequent violence, the tone is placid and slightly monotonous, as if we were watching the Walton family at the end of the world.
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There are some promising ideas and story lines here, but the pilot far outshone subsequent episodes in terms of quality and efficiency.
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Every attempt at treating a Big Idea seems sophomoric and irritating. Even in its look, the show lacks the elemental rawness necessary to throw its intellectual conflicts into sharp relief.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 206 out of 357
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Mixed: 69 out of 357
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Negative: 82 out of 357
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Jun 19, 2011
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Jun 27, 2011
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Jun 19, 2011