Hey, there’s a new show coming from AMC: Into the Badlands. At least it’s new to me!
The trailer for it came out at Comicon and is located here.
Though an original series, it’s “loosely based” on the Chinese tale ‘Journey to the West’ (since I’ve never heard of this, I’ll take their word for it). It’s about a samurai sword wielding wire-fu-jumping ninja who rides around an alternate version of the old west on a motorcycle. As a guess, he’ll be reclaiming his and/or everybody’s lost honor and/or righting wrongs and/or protecting the weak and powerless. Since this version of the old west seems to be ruled by feudal barons, most everyone else appears to be weak, powerless, or oppressed, so he’s got a lot of people to help.
There’s also a lot of poppies in the trailer, so opium. For sure.
I can’t tell if the trailer is super awesome, super cheesy, or both. In any case, it seems… intriguing, so I’m in!
AMC is impressing the hell outta me lately. I’m totally in for this. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be in some alternate past, or a dystopian future. I’m betting on dystopian future.
This looks…weird. I don’t know anything much about the Journey to the West story, so that aspect is lost on me. The production looks very uneven though. Parts of it look like they’re from a movie, parts of it look like they’re on a sound stage from the Mortal Kombat TV series.
I assume the internet will let me know if I need to check it out, but there wasn’t enough in the trailer to hook me yet.
I liked the trailer that they showed during Walking Dead. Not a lot of Kung Fu-type shows going on nowadays, especially with a cowboy/Mad Max twist. The setting looks vaguely Gone With the Wind-ish, Southern plantations and all.
Goodness, I went to middle school with the star. We were best buds for a period of time. We even traded emails a year or so back. That trailer looks great and I’d watch this show regardless.
Oh, crap - it was and I did record it, but I didn’t watch it yet. Anyone watch it? Was it decent, “as far as pilots go”? IGN was a little ho-hum on it, but I didn’t read more than the synopsis for the review, and then look at the review score (a 6).
I liked it but didn’t love it. The action was fun and the acting seemed perfectly fine to me (the roles hit me as “people” more than I expected, at least), but the logic behind the scenes seemed lacking. I can only hope that improves with time.
Okay for a pilot. The choreography is very good for TV. Daredevil level, but in the Wushu style, which is fun to watch. The acting is about B- level right now and the plotting/flow, as Dan noted, is really stiff and artificial.
Definitely going to keep watching for the fights alone.
It will be interesting to see how the audience in general will take to a program that is taking an Asian approach when it comes to plot and pacing pretty seriously. It’s one thing to be a westerner and dip your toe into a show or a movie that was made by and for an Asian audience. I really do like Daniel Wu for this though; and I’m sure the fights will keep people coming back as well.
Hmm, I didn’t notice anything unusual about it. I watched the pilot last night and liked it OK, but we’ll see if I want to keep devoting time to it what with The Man in the High Castle being released on Friday, as well as Jessica Jones on Netflix.
Really? It was 22 minutes in before it took it’s first commercial, and after that I think there were only maybe 4 or 5 other breaks. It didn’t seem bad to me at all. What was ridiculous was The Walking Dead delaying “scenes from next week’s episode” until the first commercial break (22 minutes in) only to show us 25 seconds of absolute meaningless and jumbled footage from next week. Lame.
As for the show, I enjoyed it. I had to laugh at every commercial break when they would say “coming up on Into the Badlands” and it was always a sword being drawn, two swords clashing and then stabby-stabby-death&blood. I don’t think a single word was actually uttered during those preview scenes. They certainly know their target audience. =)
Fight scenes were fantastic, the cinematography was really good, as were the sets. I wonder if this was filmed on location in New Orleans, as I could swear I’ve been to the plantation they are using as the main setting, I even recognized the little shacks where Sonny lives. The acting was OK, no worse than Walking Dead and slightly better than your standard Syfy fare. The plot is simple, but interesting. From what I gather, there are several Barons who own most of the land, they control the population in a semi-feudal style, and in the spaces in-between are nomads and criminals who sometimes raid the Barons’ holdings and sometimes do work for them. Somehow this all exists in a bubble, they haven’t really explained why everyone thinks there is no world beyond the lands of the Barons. I wonder who makes the cars and the motorcycles? Is this post-apocalyptic? Is the city where Sonny and the boy came from on the other side of some radioactive wasteland? I expect more will be revealed in episodes to come.
