Wed, December 18, 2002

As part of its wholesale reinvention of itself, the Sci Fi network this month premiered the ten-part, 20-hour epic miniseries event, Taken, from executive producer Steven Spielberg that chronicles the history of alien encounters in America, or at least presents one possible sequence of events.

The goal of the 1200-plus page screenplay is to weave together the best-known myths and legends about alien encounters and alien abduction into one thread that begins in Roswell in 1947 and proceeds right on up to today. Along the way, three families are introduced to give the story a throughline and show how different circumstances led to different types of relationships with the extra-terrestrials. And a cutely credible government/alien cat-and-mouse game attempts to explain both the reported alien phenomena and the government's often bizarre cover-up relation to the issue.

As Spielberg likes to do and Sci Fi likes to afford, mostly non-name actors were involved. Well, I say "mostly" only because I count I Am Sam's Dakota Fanning as a name actor since she could out-act Meryl Streep and she's cute as a button. With a few glaring exceptions, the performances were believable and engaging and the actors seemed well-fitted to their parts.

Fanning was just plain amazing, but I'll get to that. Others of notable mention were Joel Gretsch as Owen Crawford, Ryan Hurst as Tom Clarke, Julie-Ann Emery as Amelia Keys, and Eric Close as an alien in human form. Gretsch's Crawford is the military man who first takes over the alien project when he discovers the Roswell craft crashed in a field. (You've seen him cheating with Arye Gross's wife in the opening murder of Spielberg's Minority Report.) He was convincing as the remorseless government agent you love to hate, who plays the game for personal gain to the detriment of the project and wants only to increase his own power.

Also good is Hurst as alien debunker-turned-believer Tom Clarke, who sets out to destroy the Crawford family. Hurst plays the character over the greatest age range of any actor in the program, from teenager to mid-fifties, and really pulls it off nicely. Emery's Amelia is sweet and supportive and fills a small role with a lot of emotion, making it one of the breakout performances of the piece, despite a small amount of screen time. Eric Close does a great job achieving cool detachment with an underlying desire to learn more about caring and love.

Terrible performances come from Emily Bergl and The Blair Witch Project's Heather Donahue, who are just plain miscast in a couple of key roles. Bergl plays Fanning's mom, and does so with a dopey bumbling stupidity that is just all wrong. Donahue plays Crawford's granddaughter Mary, who butts heads with Tom Clarke in the last few episodes and it's just a shame that she provides so little for him, or the perennially magnificent Matt Frewer, to work with. She's opportunistic and evil to the core, more even than her father or grandfather, and Donahue plays it so one-dimensionally that it gives unidimensionality a bad name.

But all is forgiven. Dakota Fanning saves the day, in the part she was born to play. She's the result of the entire alien experiment: a successful cross-breed of human and alien which means she's wise beyond her years and has superhuman powers of telepathy, precognition, and similar wizardry. Fanning is always delightfully precocious because she speaks with a voice infused with a confidence few can muster at three times her age. Placing her in the role of a powerful and omniscient mutant is simply casting magic.

Surprisingly, over its twenty hours, the entirety of Taken is almost entirely cohesive. This surely results, in part, from the decision to make one writer, Les Bohem, responsible for the entire script, over 1200 pages. It's complex and involved, but the story never seems to go off track and everything ties in to everything else. Also surprising is the fact that the production values don't seem to suffer. A few shots have been largely created in the computer-generated realm to save money, but only a very few shots in such a large production actually look "too CG." By and large, the scale of the production seems much more like that of a feature film, and it's a credit to the producers that such an effect can be achieved on a Sci Fi budget, even a Sci Fi budget at the Bank of Spielberg.

Any discussion of Taken would be incomplete without mentioning its makeup effects and its aliens. The makeup is integral because so many actors are playing a character that ages twenty years or more over the course of the story. With one notable exception, Catherine Dent's unfortunate "grandma makeup," the effect is subtle and believable. Especially because the performances unfold over such an extended screen time, you almost don't notice Joel Gretsch aging until you go back and compare his first episode to his last. Ryan Hurst goes from adolescence well through middle age in subtle steps and it comes off nicely. The aliens, on the other hand, get almost no screen time, which is a bit disappointing considering the production's tight secrecy about their appearance. We weren't allowed to see them in the "Making Of" featurette before Taken aired, and we really weren't allowed to see them in Taken, either. Their design is smart, incorporating elements of the traditional "Visitor" design that is so familiar in alien lore but adding a little more detail and emotion in the eyes (surely a Spielberg touch) and a little more vulnerability in the body frame. Their rendering seems pretty good and their compositing into the scenes with actors is amazingly believable; it's just a shame we don't see more of them.

Overall, the parts of Taken come together to form a remarkably resilient whole. One episode (Acid Test) wanders off on a bit of a tangent, and a couple of the performances tend to distract a bit, but over twenty hours, it really flows together well. For a story that must involve the viewer in the lives of dozens of characters over a half-century timeline, that's an impressive accomplishment.

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