Friday, July 12, 2013

Just Forget This One

Dead Like Me: Life After Death (2009)
Director: Stephen Herek
Rated: R

Dead Like Me was a great Showtime series created by Bryan Fuller, creator of the new NBC series (which got picked up for a second season) Hannibal, the fantastic and woefully short-lived ABC series Pushing Daisies, and the even shorter lived Wonderfalls on FOX. Wonderfalls only lasted a couple of episodes, but the full series is available on DVD, and it's pretty good. Overall, Bryan Fuller's creations are unique and really fulfilling to watch. 

So, how could a straight-to-DVD movie about Reapers go wrong?

By having one of the worst stories ever, by ignoring two seasons worth of character development, by retconning established canon, by having a flimsy plot, and by focusing on George's family yet again. Overall, it's like watching someone's bad fanfiction put to film. 

The one beef I had with the TV series was the constant focus on George Lass's family. I was far more interested in how she coped with taking people's souls and seeing so much death on a daily basis. But the show insisted on going back and revisiting her family as her parents' marriage fell apart and her sister refused to accept George's untimely death. At first, it was a nice way to show how George was moving on and becoming a better Reaper, but the show continued to refocus on this family learning to accept their loss—to the point where it became a little repetitive. I mean, I understand how it was important to show how a family moves on, but they devoted a lot of screen time to them that just made me feel a little impatient.

But that's my gripe about the show. This blog entry is about the "movie."

It starts off poorly with a terrible motion comic recounting the story about the toad and the frog that George relates in the first episode, and moves on to a sudden change of venue. Der Waffle Haus, the daily meeting location of the main Reapers, has burnt down off screen. We also discover that Rube has received his lights and moved on. Off screen. The team is sent to a posh restaurant to meet up with their new head Reaper, Cameron, and find out that he's obscenely rich and prefers the hands-off approach to leading them in their daily assignments. Which he gives them digitally instead of through the old Post-It note method. 

Everything falls apart once this change in leadership happens. Roxy saves the life of her reap—something that is not supposed to be done because (as it is explained in the first episode of the series) once a person's number is up, their soul is liable to rot within their body if it is not reaped when it's supposed to be reaped. This is something that Roxy would never do in the show's canon. She becomes enamored with the attention she receives for saving the man's life, and it feels nothing like the Roxy we know. 

Daisy, played by a different actress than the one in the show, has lost all two seasons of her character development. We're back to watching the Daisy of the first few episodes of her introduction. She is selfish, opportunistic, loud, careless, and doesn't take her work seriously. She feels like a totally different character and it's insulting to watch after seeing Daisy's character as a broken, thoughtful, and (eventually) caring individual who sees George as something of a little sister. Daisy in the movie makes her reap on time, but shirks the responsibility of leading him to his lights in favor of selfish reasons. The result is the creation of a ghost—something that never happened in the show.

Mason's problem is that he allows himself to be recorded getting shot by a robber on a convenience store surveillance camera. In the incident, he gets right back up and ends up robbing the cash register (I don't remember exactly what happened, but I refuse to watch this movie again, so that's that). This does slightly reminded me of the episode where he spent the entire time telling a group of goth people about how he was a Reaper ("Rites of Passage"), or when he confessed the same to a hot record store employee ("Rest In Peace"). But, once again, this means that Mason's character development has just vanished.

I've seen reviews of this that claim that everyone is back to their old ways, but that seems like something that would only have worked if this movie happened before the second season. 

George gets fired from her job at Happy Time by Delores and throws herself into her reaping. We see that her mother, Joy, is now a grief counseling guru (disregarding her growing reputation as someone who is the best ever at organizing stuff) and her sister, Reggie, is in a secret relationship with the high school football star. The same high school football star that George has to reap. 

As with almost every reap in this movie, something goes wrong and George is forced to hang out at the hospital and try to reap this kid every once in a while. She ends up revealing herself to her sister to stop her from committing suicide and there is a lot of retconning nonsense that goes on in this A plot. 

In the B plot, Roxy and the others grow wise to Cameron's manipulations and try to kill him for good. In a sequence that goes on for far too long, they end up cutting him into little pieces (we don't see this happen, but it's implied when Mason goes and gets a chainsaw) and burning it all into a pile of ash that they shoot out into space along with the ashes of Delores's cat. And that's the end of that conflict. It would have been more satisfying if they had found a way to contact the higher ups about the problem and we could have seen how things are handled by upper management. 

Those questions we all had of where the lists come from, and what happened Betty when she jumped into that one guy's version of the afterlife ("Reaping Havoc") are all left unanswered. I wanted to know these things. I wanted to know what the "lights" were like for an evil person. I wanted to know why George could reap gravelings. I wanted to know if that meant she could reap other Reapers. I wanted to know who upper management was. I wanted to see more reaping divisions. In the show, Mason talks about how easy the plague division has it, but I want to know more. Is their quota as high as external influence? Or are they forced to stay on this plane of existence for even longer? 

None of my questions or your questions from the series are answered. 

Add to that the fact that canon was mostly ignored and you've got a terrible addition to the Dead Like Me universe. 

Sure, the sets are great and the dialogue is fine (except Daisy). But overall, this is one to avoid. All it did was make me disappointed in the worst way. I regret watching it. Skip this one, folks, even if you're a fan of Dead Like Me.


1 comment:

  1. this movie was beyond awful. :/ such a shame since the show is flawless.

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