Alias: The Complete First Season
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DVD details
Actor: Carl Lumbly, Kevin Weisman, Michael Vartan, Ron Rifkin, Victor GarberBrand: Alias
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Box set, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 990 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2009-04-07
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: ABC Studios
Product features:
- Golden Globe Award-winning actress Jennifer Garner (Best Actress In A Television Series, 2002) is Sydney Bristow. Syd's not exactly your average grad student. Her life might appear normal, but she's hiding a secret life working as a spy for the CIA. Sydney's world is turned upside down when she learns she may work for the very enemy she thought she was fighting. Now she's entangled
DVD Reviews of Alias: The Complete First Season
DVD Review: Take a good look at the cover, because thats what the show is mostly about
Summary: 3 Stars
Firstly, I have never seen this show before. I saw in on Amazon for under $20 and I need a show. I need a show with enough action to keep my attention on the tredmill every night, and preferably enough of a female element to interest my wife, so we have a show to watch together. Alias meets both criteria, but only just barely.
All my reviews are spoiler free, so I won't ruin the plot by giving it away, but seriously, 1/2 of all the episodes involve secret agent Sydney Bristow dressing up in a slinky outfit with a sexy hairdo to infiltrate a swanky party always being thrown in the same building as a secret base for her to break into and steal some item or artifact. Apparently bad guys are quite fond of swanky parties and also can't get away from the "office" long enough to really enjoy them, so why not throw a party at the secret bad guy base? Perfect! Well maybe not. Sure, I can appreciate Jennifer Garners mid driff and long sexy legs as much as the next guy, but after a while it feels like I'm watching a game of "dress up" when every other episode involves her dolling up in a new sexy dress.
Mixed in with the action are "daddy issues", "mommy issues", friend issues, romance, long discussions worthy of daytime drama and a good dose of crying and hand wringing over Sydneys life foibles. Fortunatly, my wife enjoys those parts too, so it gives us something to enjoy together, Alias has become "our show".
There is too much violence and torture for my tastes. Some things the bad guys (and some of the "good guys") do is just too graphic for the both of us.
We bought the whole series and will watch it all eventually, but the main plot line is starting to feel too much like "Lost", which is a show I despise. "Lost" is a snipe hunt. After watching "Lost" for years, it has become clear that there is no underlying plot, its just a bunch of crap the writer thinks up over coffee that day. If you remember Lost, there was a point where the story starting going off from reality (People stranded on an island trying to survive) to fantasy (smoke monsters, dead people flash backs, mystical powers, etc). The first half of Alias season one is quasi reality (a female secret agent) and 1/2 way through gets mystical (500 year old prophesies, machines created by an ancient mystic prophet named Rambaldi who keeps coming up for reasons that are, by the end of Season 1, not at all explained) and part of it starts to feel silly.
Overall the writing is passable. There are a couple good scenes and a couple good plot twists. In fact there are many plot twists, but most of them are blindingly obvious. A lot of the time I can't tell if the writers are being serious or tounge-in-cheek as well. One time they need to disarm some C4 plastic explosives. It is "hidden" in a maintenance closet in big boxes with "C4" written all over it. One character says, "well I can tell its C4, because it has "C4" written all over it." Also, working in Network Admin (as I do) is a liability for enjoying some of the show, because I know that things don't work the way the writers think they do. Wireless Modems don't steal data off hard disks just by putting them 4 inches away from a mainframe, for example... Unfortunatly, there is quite a bit of this sillyness, but thats a common problem.
In the end, each episode got me interested enough to watch the next, so its certainly worth the under $20 price, but I have no doubt that the whole underlying "Rambaldi" plot will not pan out to my satisfaction...
Description of Alias: The Complete First Season
Studio: Buena Vista Home Video Release Date: 03/03/2009Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) is a super (and super sexy) spy, fighting nefarious villains and working for the good guys--or so she thinks. Recruited as a college freshman for espionage work, Sydney found her true calling with SD-6, a secret division of the CIA. When her hunky doctor-boyfriend proposes to her, she decides to let him in on the truth she's not supposed to tell anyone: she's not a grad student with a demanding job for an international bank, but a secret agent who constantly puts her life on the line for the free world. But when SD-6 discovers her security breach, her fiancé is brutally assassinated, and Sydney suddenly finds herself face-to-face with the truth: she's been working for the bad guys. Deciding to become a double agent for the CIA and bring down the evildoers, Sydney gets one more surprise--her estranged father (Victor Garber) is also working for SD-6, and the CIA as well. Welcome to the family, Syd!
Confusing? This is all just in the first episode of Alias, the brainchild of Felicity creator J.J. Abrams that plays like a cross between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and James Bond. With its double-edged tension (how long can Syd play double agent?) and one heck of a MacGuffin (the dreaded Rambaldi device, the mythic creation of a Renaissance genius), the show leads its viewers from episode to episode with visceral, compelling action, not to mention the nascent romance between Syd and her CIA handler, Vaughn (Michael Vartan), and her clashes with her heretofore distant father. Sharp, smart, and always suspenseful, Alias' center was held by the gorgeous Garner, a stellar action heroine and an even better actress who could pull off Sydney's exotic undercover missions and conflicted emotions with equal dexterity. By the end of this first season, which concludes with a breathtaking cliffhanger, you'll be seduced into Alias' world with, happily, no desire to escape. --Mark Englehart
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