SyFy Ascension movie 2014 who's watching??

For TV Science Fiction, I'll give the CW's "The 100" a whole more credit with combining 'eyecandy' with intelligent storylines, than what SyFy did with with "Ascension", "Ascension" is that dumb.

 

I'm in agreement.

 

It looked like they spent about $1.98 on some of those Helix visual effects.

 

Yep. Probably why it was renewed! Lol.

No, seriously,I did enjoy some of Helix but many of the visuals particularly the digital backgrounds/CGI were underwhelming. I could do better on a Mac from a decade ago.

 

Actually, CW shows are generally a little better.

 

I liked the production design.

 

I did as well, the vaguely retro look was perfect for a space mission from the early 1970s. I thought Ascension was pretty good for a mini-series. I could see the concept becoming a stretch on a running television show, but its premise was mostly believable in the span of six episodes.

 

Just staggered through the first two episodes, and it's haaaaaarible. Stupid and lame and predictable and badly done from start to finish. Godamighty, this is a bad show.

But I gotta say, the first-show ending reveal was a shocker. As jaded and cynical as I am, this twist did surprise me. So there was five good minutes out of almost 4 hours of shows.

 

It was light years better than most of the programming SyFy has been putting on its air the past decade. I know that is not a high standard, but there you have it. It did appear that some running arcs got cut short for time.

 

I'm trying to figure out how a repressive socialistic-governed society that has pre-determined marriages still has hookers all over the spaceship. And angry people working in sleeze at the bottom of the ship, while the people on top are having champagne parties. Come on.

I'll say this: I got an hour into the show and said, "how the F could NASA have been able to create a spaceship this massive and this advanced that could go this far back in 1963?" And my question was answered very satisfactorily by the end of the first episode, and the answer made total sense.

Sad that they got launched before the Beatles hit in America. BTW, anybody catch the huge technology mistake (one of many), where they showed a "vintage" turntable playing a Sarah Vaughan record, only it had a P-mount cartridge. Funny, but I don't think those existed in 1963...

The "security VTRs" they showed were also laughably fake. Why not just have 1963 Ampex VTRs, which definitely existed? Heck, even industrial machines would've been OK.

 

I'm still trying to figure how they would generate that kind of gravity for a 'beach' in outer space, though they're really not....well you know...

 

Well, there's an explanation for the artificial gravity. Hint: the gravity is real.

 

[QUOTE="Vidiot,
Sad that they got launched before the Beatles hit in America. BTW, anybody catch the huge technology mistake (one of many), where they showed a "vintage" turntable playing a Sarah Vaughan record, only it had a P-mount cartridge. Funny, but I don't think those existed in 1963... .[/QUOTE]

Don't forget they invented the MRI on that thing. I guess that's how we got the P-mount as well.

 

LOL, I know the gravity is 'real' (no spoilers, but I watched the whole thing!). They need to justify how they could create artificial gravity in the '60, which they couldn't, but then again I guess according to the script, after 100 years they'll figure it out with whatever 'fantastic' tech advancement they come up with in that ship!

 

Man, that was one of the stupidest things I've seen in a long while. I was about to call it quits about 15mins into the first ep, but decided to stick with it (in fast forward mode) as there was going to be some kind of big reveal at the end. Sure enough there was, and I was prepared to give it another chance and attempt to watch the rest. Well, I tried, and it was just too stupid to watch in real time, so I kept on fast forwarding and watching but it was just dumb as dirt and I gave up!

If this is supposed to be an example of the Renaissance of Syfy, I'd say they still have a long, long, long way to go!

 

Well, there's six hours of my life I'll never get back!

 

God, I just watched the final part and lived to tell the tale. Good god, who wrote this piece of crap? I think Deesky above was far too kind on it. This is a huge, massive, steaming goat turd. You could do a 2-hour movie just on the illogic and inanity of the script.

For example: in 50+ years, nobody on the ship ever had a reason to go outside and do a repair? Nobody ever questioned the gravity... even when they lost all power, they still had gravity! Nobody asked how JFK managed to steal billions from the defense budget and put it in this program? They managed to hoodwink 70 of the world's greatest scientists, stick them on a ship with 500 other people, and nobody ever even once questioned the mission? How'd they pull off the launch? Where does all the waste go? I saw about 6 head of cattle and 12 pigs on this ship -- how do they feed 600 people from that? Are they all living on Jello Pudding?

 

Sorry, I'd dropped the ball! The main reason I wasn't as vocal about the gazillion plot holes is that I skipped over most of them while in fast forward mode. I watch until the stupid reaches a certain threshold and then go into FF mode until I have recovered.

But even without being fully aware of all the plot holes, I could tell it would be bad just by the acting style and snippets of dialog I'd caught prior to watching it as a whole.

I'm surprised you were able to stomach all of it.

 

I'm still in a state of shock. Who the F approves stuff like this to go on the air? Mother of god, this thing was bad. Easily the worst made-for-TV movie I've seen in many years.

 

I can't imagine that SyFy could pull off anything worth my time.

 

I've only watched the first night and thought where is the engineer who knows anything about the systems that keep the ship running and can figure out that the whole thing is a ruse?

"Captain your a ***** in charge of a ship of fools"

 

I think you guys are being overly harsh. It wasn't good, but its a step in the right direction for SyFy. At least its the right kind of show. The right subject matter. Not reality ghost hunters or WWE or the silly intentionally campy monster movies they've been doing.

Since everything the people on the ship get as input from their instruments is controlled from the outside, I can see how the people running the program could keep them in the dark. And all of these people are 2nd generation guinea pigs. They were born on the ship and have lived their whole lives there, only knowing that the people running the experiment want them to know. There are even people on the ship in on it and working along with those running the experiment. As for food, there are a lot of decks on the "ship". They refer to the "lower 40", which I assume means the lower 40 decks. How many decks are on the right side of the tracks? There's a lot on the ship we never saw. Just because one room they showed us with the few lower 40 characters only had a certain amount of cattle, that doesn't mean that is all there is. There is presumably a lot more. With that many decks. they have plenty of space to create the food necessary for 600 people.

So while I grant it takes a generous suspension of disbelief, I don't think its the all time steaming turd some are making it out to be.

 

I watched the first two episodes and gave up. Went and watched some classic Twilight Zone episodes instead.

 

The plot sounds like it was envisioned while sitting around the bar having a few beers. I think it's actually a pretty neat idea, but it's simply impossible to believe that something like this could be pulled off, especially in the early 1960s. Somebody should have raised their hand during the approval process and sorted out the plot device.

If you really recruited a large number of the best and brightest scientists at the time, you would have had to have a believable working system and the scientists would need to have a deep understanding of how every system worked. The top scientists in the world are not sheep. Under constant 1g acceleration (however they managed this), it would also take much less than 100 years to get to Proxima Centauri. In fact, I just looked it up, you can get to most places in the known universe and back if you can constantly accelerate at 1g for 100 years. I'm not sure what led them to believe Proxima was a habitable place anyway. That's an insane amount of effort on a million-to-one shot.

Overall, this would just be amazingly difficult to spoof, unless you had mindless people aboard who didn't monitor systems or take any measurements. It would just be too difficult to hide the fact they are not moving. It is a 100% certainty that at some point they would need to go outside the ship. Also, something about the artificial star field or sensor inputs would soon give away the ruse. They talked about jamming terrestrial signals, that would also raise flags, like where is all this electromagnetic noise coming from?

 

I think you have to look beyond the nitty gritty details in a show like this one. I think we were supposed to believe that the ship's crew had been led to believe the computer was making all repairs on its own, remember how they deferred to its genetic profile matching program for couples?