Michael, an American architect, travels to London to lend his skills in the
updating of the Arcadia Hotel, and soon finds himself unwittingly involved
in the search for a serial-killer nicknamed "The Ripper", while having to
face his blossoming psyshic ability to "see dead people".
While the premise is an old chestnut - at least it's a good premise. At
times "The Sight" is very formulaic, but never dull, and it showcases plenty
of
inventive camerawork. Actually, at times Paul Anderson's foray into
television looks like an American TV Movie (even with cringe-makingly bad
British stereotypical dialogue.) Can the phrase "Got the bugger!" really
cause shivers so easily on TV...?
What did impress was the effective lighting and camera trickery -
particularly of a neon-lit London at night and during the "vision"
sequences. I have no idea who funded the show, but wouldn't be surprised if
the idea is to sell this to US networks in the future.
Plot-wise, the first half of "The Sight" leads viewers into a
seemingly bizarre set-up, but then quickly reveals that the set-up is
actually fairly standard genre fare, and then proceeds to get dragged down
when the "real" plot kicks in. Kind of like a bad Dean Koontz novel.
It's at the mid-point juncture (marked when Michael becomes partners with
female Detective Price) that "The Sight" sinks to become just a glossier
version of "The Bill", and so loses much of the mystique it quickly attained
to begin with.
However, I certainly didn't guess who the killer was (but, with hindsight,
perhaps I just wasn't paying attention to the story because the true star of
the show was the visuals!). It certainly wasn't the characters that drew you
in to the story. Andrew McCarthy's psychic Michael was very 2-dimensional (I
don't we learned a single thing about him except he's an American
architect!), while Amanda Redman merely did the "middle-aged, aggrieved,
fiesty female policewoman" stereotype we've seen a million times before.
Secondary characters were even more superflous...
But, as I think people expect from shows like this nowadays, it did contain
a lot of good scenes which always appeared whenever things got a bit too
"standard" to kick viewers awake. Of particular note was the excellent
subway train flashback to World War II during the blitz, and the perplexing
apocalyptic imagery in the epilogue.
But for all its eye-candy, I'm not sure what "The Sight" has set itself up
to be. It's taken its cue from "The Sixth Sense", yet the thrust of the
story was never about Michael's ability to see ghosts, more a plot-device to
make the detective work easier to write. By the end, it also belatedly
starts making elusive statements about Michael's "role" to play now he's been
passed on The Sight, told mostly in voice-over as we watch some stunning
imagery of New York after a nuclear disaster...
A triumph of style over substance then. But it's very early days. If they
can make the characters into PEOPLE, and start weaving some kind of story-arc
into future shows, this could snowball into a hit for Sky. I'll certainly be
watching next week - if only to work out where the nuclear fallout scenes fit
into all this...
As of April 2009, Blu-rays and DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TH-37PX80B
37" Plasma TV with a Sony BDP-1500 Blu-ray player and played through a Yamaha DSP-AX820 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Jan 2011: Intel Quad Core Dell XPS 8100, i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80Ghz, 8Gb RAM, nVidia GeForce GTS 240, Windows 7
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
From Paul Anderson
- director of "Mortal Kombat",
