First of all, it is shot like a documentary (the thinking man’s genre), but drops the format whenever it becomes inconvenient. The story they choose to tell, of a fugitive who eventually disappears for good, could never really be told as a documentary. It’s a bad fit.

Second, the human characters are barely believable. Wikus van der Merwe, the bureaucrat chosen to orchestrate the alien evacuation, is almost “Michael Scott” incompetent. (Perhaps that and the documentary style were an attempt to capitalize on the success of The Office?)

We’re told that “prawns” is a derogatory name for the aliens, but everybody uses that word (including alien-sympathetic protestors) and we never hear what the politically correct name is. Humans are so terrible they learned the alien’s click-language but never bothered to ask them what they liked to be called!

Wikus becomes infected with something that allows him to operate alien weaponry. Within hours a group of scientists and bureaucrats are discussing how best to chop him up to harness this ability. They are having this conversation in front of Wikus, him while he is conscious and objecting. They ignore him.

That is ridiculous. Humans can be cruel, but we accomplish this by distancing ourself from suffering and abstracting away the victims. That scene would have been a lot more believable if it were set in a board room.

It also would have helped if at least one of them had some reservations about cutting his heart out of his chest without sedation. Just one character to say, “Are you sure we need to do this?” Even if she (it would, of course, be the only woman in the room) was immediately shut down with a reply like, “We have no choice,” a moment like that would lend a lot of credibility to the film.

All of the shortcomings and inconsistencies would be more forgivable if the film was unashamed to be an action movie. It is well made and visually excellent. But the fact that it pretends to be something smarter, when it isn’t, makes it a serious disappointment.

In summary, I feel exactly the same way about it as Roger Ebert.

Anyway, I’ve watched four seasons in thirty days and I kind of want to talk about it. So here we go. I know the show is five years old and probably everything here has been written by someone else, but this is my blog.

A lot of the drama comes from characters refusing to, or doing a poor job of, answering questions. There’s no reason Juliet couldn’t have diffused a lot of tension by saying, “I was tricked into living on the Island because I thought I was taking a job with a pharmaceutical company and I want to go home, too.” Also, I don’t understand why Daniel Faraday believed that it was better to cryptically insist that the camp wasn’t gone rather than just say, “We’ve gone back in time.” He could have spared himself from fifteen minutes of arguing and a slap in the face from Sawyer.

I’m no student of literature, but I suppose LOST is not unique, and that’s where a lot of drama comes from. But LOST clearly depends on it, at first keeping the characters in the dark and then, in season four, the viewer also.

In the first three seasons, the format of the show was very clear: a story on the Island interleaved with flashbacks to a story before the crash. To be honest, any spoilers that I had come across never bothered me, because the show is really engaging. The two stories always tied together in a very clever way, such as Kate trying to save Jack despite his instruction not to versus Kate killing her abusive stepfather against her mother’s wishes. Both stories are about acting selfishly under cover of helping someone you love.

Although there was plenty of mystery in the first three seasons, you always knew at least as much as the main characters did. The writers withheld information from you so that you could identify with the characters.

In season four, with the inclusion of flashforwards, that changes. Once off the island, the characters clearly know what happened to them, but the scenes are carefully crafted to keep you guessing. This is most clear in the episode where Sun gives birth and Jin races to the hospital with a toy panda. Only at the very end do you learn that Jin was presenting a gift to a Chinese executive on behalf of Paik Automotive, before the plane crash; then you see Sun visit Jin’s grave and explain that she was calling for her husband during the birth because she was delirious. Ha ha, fooled you!

This is mildly irritating, because the mysteries in season four are no longer part of the story, they are part of the show. They are not shared with any of the characters; they exist only as an artifact of the video editing process. Season five seems to be rectifying this, but I’m only a few episodes in.

Other thoughts:

• I was really intrigued by Shannon, and how she managed to seem like a stuck up bitch every situation, even when she wasn’t. Then I noticed that a mini-theme of female characters with really strange facial expressions: both Juliet and Charlotte look kind of smug, all of the time. Maybe I am horribly sexist?
• The writers go out of the way to make the red shirt characters act like condescending assholes. If a survivor you’ve never seen before starts complaining about everything, insulting everybody, and not contributing anything, he is going to die. It’s interesting that they work so hard to make you dislike these people, presumably so you won’t mind too much when they are killed. It’s not like the show has avoided killing more endearing characters.
• I really enjoy seeing The Numbers show up everywhere, but apparently I am soon to learn that they are factors in some equation, which I’m sure will make no mathematical sense and thereby ruin it for me.