as Donnie Darko is plainly superior to both Threshold

Threshold's actually superior to Donnie Darko. Part of me wants to put hard work into proving that to you but I guess it would probably be futile . . .

In the process, I saw way too many lousy special effects, too much wooden acting, heard far too much bad dialogue, and was subjected to that big guy with the funny oval thing glued to his forehead.

Hehe. They must've showed it twice because I caught the Farscape preview in the second commercial break. Far too little. I don't think it did much more than remind people that Farscape exists and was cancelled much too early . . .

I would welcome the attempt, but fear it would be futile.


All right, here goes . . .

The first thing that comes to my mind that Threshold has over Donnie Darko is that Threshold did a better job of respecting its own reality.

The most obtrusive flaw in Donnie Darko was Patrick Swayze's character--or, I should say, caricature. It's true there're plenty of magic self-help regimes in real life very much like the one pushed by Swayze's character. But the portrayal of it in Darko does not for a moment make you believe that a real person could actually be persuaded to follow it, primarily because it comes off as too ridiculous. All the characters that push it and follow it seem more like parodies of real people than actual real people, like characters from a Saturday Night Live skit. Part of the problem is that Swayze lacks real charisma, at least in this role. Compare him to the similar character played by Tom Cruise in Magnolia. Cruise's guru is more credible because he comes of like someone who doesn't take himself so seriously. Of course, he does take himself very serious but he behaves as if he really believes in his philosophy, and that everyone who shares it is in with him on a joke being played on the rest of humanity.

While Swayze's character needn't have necessarily employed precisely this same tact, he definitely needed something like it where it would be easier to see why he could capture the minds of so many people. It was essential that this thing Donnie is up against seem more menacing and complicated. The scene where Donnie speaks against Swayze at the assembly ought to work like this; in the confusing midst of the piper's lulling song, the hero stands to slice through the peace with an uncomfortable reality that, naturally, no one listens to. What we get instead is Donnie trying to reason with the three stooges. Sure, we agree with him, but there's not much point in saying so. It's almost like propaganda.

This cuts into the thrust of the whole movie as the point of the movie is that Donnie's a hero because he's different and it's horrible but inevitable--because he's a hero--that he had to die. Of course, there's another problem here because the movie doesn't make a convincing argument that Donnie couldn't have walked out of his room anyway without still being a hero. It seems more like he got distracted. I can still kind of dig the sadness at the end, but it's more senseless than I think it was meant to be. I think we were meant to see it as Donnie's sacrifice to save Gertrude and the world.

Meanwhile, Threshold is tighter. I don't think you were trying to convince the reader that any of your characters were as heroic as the makers of Donnie Darko were trying to convince us that Donnie was heroic (mind you, I don't count that as making Threshold either superior or inferior--it merely makes it different). Threshold, instead of being the conflict of characters vs. caricatures, is more characters vs. themselves, frequently by way of communication with other characters. The menace is frightening for its non-human qualities, and it works. The non-human things in Donnie Darko, like Donnie's visions before we know what they mean, act only as cool effects because Donnie's reactions to them are difficult to understand. Not always a bad thing in fiction, but it is here, as it essentially dismembers the story.

We're told something in Threshold by the unravelling of people's mindworks as they react to the mysterious strangeness. Darko tells us nothing except that Donnie is an intriguing guy.

So, I say Threshold's superior because it has more whole characters, better use of an inhuman menace, and a cute girl getting a nasty wound when she goes out barefoot (that last one could be just my predilection).

I think he's a bit harsh on Darko in the end, but he does make good points, most validly as to how Threshold is better, with which I agree.

I also thought The Butterfly Effect rocked. I actually liked it a bit more than Darko ... Darko was more accomplished and maverick, but comparatively chilly. It didn't even TOUCH Threshold, but in a way, it was exploring much different emotional ground than either of the other two. Though as a novel, Threshold can branch off into back story and such, both it and Darko are relatively tightly contained narratives, about the succession of events for the characters at a specific place in their lives. The time travel/change device is a pivetal aspect, the punch line if you will. It's not the characters' chief concern for most of the story, even if it is *responsible* for those concerns unbenknownst to them, and by extension, same goes for the audience. TBE is all about a character's on-going experience with this phenomenon, exploring one version of the possibilities much more in depth. People who bitch about how the changes aren't more far-reaching, don't change the whole world, etc., are missing the point, period. That's another movie, and the filmmakers chose this one. Who's life isn't filled with pivotal moments where we look back and agonize over, "What if I'd done this/what if I could go back into that moment and.../etc." The device of having Kutchner's character "speak through" previous versions of himself was the most brilliant device, because that specifically is something I suspect many people fantasise about doing.

And I thought I had some twisted fixations. Though now you mention it, I can see the lure of the fetish ...


I believe it'll be the next stage in Quentin Tarantino's evolution as an artist. And Nar'eth's already there, if not beyond it!

I tuned in to SG-1 just for the Farscape commercial and got lucky--it aired in the first fifteen minutes. Huzzah! :)

If anyone would like to download the Quicktime version of the Peacekeeper Wars trailer to watch on their own, then here's a link:

http://www.watchfarscape.com/files/pkwar-qt.zip

Those are amazing quotes, thank you for posting them.