Evengyny Thanks for the memories!

Matrixiole Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Michelle Ridley The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

simonmoon There are so many problems with his series. The writing, the characters, and the plot are all faulty. I can forgive the science being bad, and the super-natural elements contrived, but the way people act and the way the conventional world works should remain believable. A crooked cop making 1000 times what's possible selling party drugs in a tiny remote village. A group of anti-logging environmentalists, who can effectively stop loggers without police intervention. Casting of actors that seems to have been done without regard to age or appearance. Why is Renae with someone who looks 25 years to young for her ? Why is the handsome, randomly caring and sometimes competent, mysterious, drug dealing cop, having an affair with a frumpy middle-aged woman ? Why would the main character sleep with the drug dealing cop, who has been a creep to her ? Why do people keep secrets for almost no reason ? Why do police officers witness crimes like the burying of a body without doing anything ? Why is there a doctor who gives tours of a women's prison, because of corruption, instead of moving to a new town, or alerting state authorities of local corruption ? Why is their so much un-milled lumber at a mill that needs lumber to mill ? It's not how police work ? It's not how environmental activists work. It's not how the lumber industry works. It's not how a small town economy works ?

Myriam Nys (Review based on seeing the whole season one.)The series treats a number of environmental themes, such as deforestation. This is a thing to be proud of. Still, I couldn't help thinking that the series was missing a golden opportunity : give the screenplay and storylines a very slight twist and you could have a thriller or drama series about the environment that's not only tense, but informative and topical too. Imagine the following plot : somewhere within the seemingly pristine beauty of these superb woods, criminals are building an illegal dump for dangerous waste. Two girls happen to witness one of the waste transports. One of the girls gets murdered, the other one suffers serious head injuries causing partial memory loss. Fifteen years later, the survivor - by now a doctor of some note - returns to her home town and discovers that many of its inhabitants are ill with mysterious diseases. Moreover, the surrounding woods are disfigured by strange growths or barren spots. The survivor discovers the cause : noxious substances, coming from the dump, have been leaking into the soil and the water.And voilà : you've got a thrilling series that makes sense, too. It's not even difficult to write such a screenplay : go to the website of one of the major environmental protection conventions (say "Basel" on waste or "Stockholm" on persistent organic pollutants) and you'll find a choice of real-life horror stories, complete with case histories and timelines. But no, for some reason or other "Kettering" provides us with hours of katzenjammer about strange signals, UFO's, government conspiracies, triffids, the Dyatlov Pass incident and so on. (Mind you, it's very stylish katzenjammer.) It's possible that the series, in later seasons, will be able to distill something coherent out of this wild and extravagant mix, but I doubt it. Mark the words of your old auntie Myriam : I fear that this will become a "Lost" II, meaning that the viewer will get lots and lots of riddles, questions, in-jokes, dream sequences, mysteries, alternative futures and so on, but no overarching narrative and no resolution. I'm still giving "Kettering" seven stars, for its eerie, brooding atmosphere and its superb (and superbly filmed) locations, exteriors and nature scenes. With regard to the Dyatlov Pass incident : no, I don't know what happened to those poor people, but I do know that they died young and under horrid circumstances. So why use their death as a source of cheap thrills ? It's bad enough having to die this way (while knowing your friends are dying too) without getting buried, posthumously, under several feet of UFO nonsense.

Canuckity Jane This has just begun showing on BBC Canada. We recorded the first two episodes this week, and just watched #1. I came here to see whether it was likely to be worth continuing, and possibly to get a clue about what it was that I just watched.I am not a person with no imagination or appreciation for ambiguity or interest in being challenged, blah blah. I'll stick to it if a series seems that it might contain something interesting for the brain to work on. And I have actually been a huge fan of Australian series in the past -- yes, all the way back to Flying Doctors when the Canadian network that owned 9 Network showed it for years in late-night rerun. Because yes, I like being entertained too. More recently: The Slap, for example, was excellent. And we've lost track of A Place to Call Home, given the random way BBC Canada shows things, but hope to sort that out with summer and some free time here now.The chance to see places one will never go, and the people who live there, is enough to give a series a starting star. That's where this one stops, and we stop watching it.I've always been eager to watch pretty much any drama that originates in Australia or the UK, but I've observed a tedious phenomenon in some recent offerings from both places.Is it really too much to ask that a show have an actual script, with some actual dialogue? Or to occasionally be able to see (or at least figure out) what the heck is going on on-screen during the loooong stretches of wordless inaction in the dark? And maybe possibly just perhaps, that there be something about a character or a plot to make one give a damn what happens and want to invest time and effort into finding out? Maybe just an actual character who isn't a cardboard cutout, and an actual plot, of some kind? One hopes that the scriptwriters were paid by the word, is all I can say.

Lars Bear There is a certain kind of person who gets a kick out of suggesting that if a book, or a film, makes little sense, the reader or viewer is lacking in imagination or intellectual capacity. I can see that a few of these bottom-feeders have already been active in this discussion. The reality is that, while a movie or a book need not have a clear, linear plot that is fully explicated, to be credible it must give the impression that there _is_ such a plot. That is, we must at least come away with the impression that the writers knew what they were doing, even if nobody else does. Moreover, to be worth investing time in watching or reading it, it must be possible for an attentive person of ordinary memory and attention span to get this impression in a single reading or viewing, not two or three.So the original series of Twin Peaks works, even though it leaves many questions unanswered. That, too, was about odd, quasi-supernatural goings on in a scenic logging town. But with TP there was enough coherence in the storyline that, even though we go away baffled, we still think that -- at some level or other -- it makes sense. It might only make sense in David Lynch's head but he, at least, knew what it was all about. Well, maybe.That's the problem with the Kettering Incident -- there are so many disconnected, unrelated plot elements, that it doesn't give me any confidence that there is any underlying coherence. Rather, it looks like four or more unrelated stories shoe-horned together. It's almost as if the writers didn't really care whether it made sense, so long as they could write scenes where the actors stare moodily at one another with mountains in the background. It's difficult to care about the characters, because it feels as if the writers didn't care about them. Not enough to make them behave like real folks, anyway. The whole thing plods along with a smug, leaden seriousness, as if the slightest moment of levity would make people realize how silly the whole thing is.What rescues The Kettering Incident from being complete dross is the cinematography and overall atmosphere. Many, many scenes in the movie would look great as still images. It's almost worth watching just for this; but only almost.