![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
My previous experience with Joss Whedon projects: I loved the first few seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer before the angst went completely over the top. I thought Angel was an unwatchable bore. I was ambivalent about Firefly.
So how was Dollhouse?
It kind of reminded me of a live action version of Gunslinger Girl only less stylish, despite its efforts to be sleek and cool. Young women (so far, although there were some guys in the background) are programmed with a new personality that overrides their own so that they can be whatever the shadowy organization that employs them needs them to be, over and over and over again. Each asset also gets a handler who follows her in the field to protect her.
Based on interviews with Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku, this series was designed to be a showcase for Dushku with the personality implants allowing her to play essentially a completely different character in each episode, and sometimes more than one character in an episode. Now, I love Eliza Dushku when she's playing blue collar tough chicks (I would pay money to see her as a hunter on Supernatural), but in this episode at least she just didn't have the range necessary to make me feel she was playing a completely different person each time. It was just Eliza Dushku in a different outfit (ranging from a long pencil skirt and glasses to a dress so short there's no way on earth she could've bent over or sat down without flashing everyone around her).
The sequences within the Dollhouse itself where the assets vaguely wandered around temporarily personality free were kind of...odd. I suspect the idea was to show the assets as open and naive and childlike with no memories to shape a personality or responses to their surroundings, but they wound up with the kind of flat affect and dead eyes one usually sees on models drifting down fashion runways. I was waiting for Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn to pop out from behind a door and tell me which designer won the tank top and yoga pants challenge.
Is the show hopeless? Not necessarily. Eliza Dushku doesn't appear to have the acting range to pull off the series as an actor's showcase, but she can kick some serious ass, and so can her co-star Dichen Lachman. Watching women kick ass and take names? I'm there. But I won't stay there unless I care about these characters, and I'm not really there yet. The fact that each character becomes a different character each week due to the personality implants and is completely personality free between jobs won't help either. I'll give it a few more episodes to see where it's going, but I really miss the ultra-sharp dialogue that Buffy had. None of Joss's shows after that have been nearly as much fun to listen to.
So how was Dollhouse?
It kind of reminded me of a live action version of Gunslinger Girl only less stylish, despite its efforts to be sleek and cool. Young women (so far, although there were some guys in the background) are programmed with a new personality that overrides their own so that they can be whatever the shadowy organization that employs them needs them to be, over and over and over again. Each asset also gets a handler who follows her in the field to protect her.
Based on interviews with Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku, this series was designed to be a showcase for Dushku with the personality implants allowing her to play essentially a completely different character in each episode, and sometimes more than one character in an episode. Now, I love Eliza Dushku when she's playing blue collar tough chicks (I would pay money to see her as a hunter on Supernatural), but in this episode at least she just didn't have the range necessary to make me feel she was playing a completely different person each time. It was just Eliza Dushku in a different outfit (ranging from a long pencil skirt and glasses to a dress so short there's no way on earth she could've bent over or sat down without flashing everyone around her).
The sequences within the Dollhouse itself where the assets vaguely wandered around temporarily personality free were kind of...odd. I suspect the idea was to show the assets as open and naive and childlike with no memories to shape a personality or responses to their surroundings, but they wound up with the kind of flat affect and dead eyes one usually sees on models drifting down fashion runways. I was waiting for Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn to pop out from behind a door and tell me which designer won the tank top and yoga pants challenge.
Is the show hopeless? Not necessarily. Eliza Dushku doesn't appear to have the acting range to pull off the series as an actor's showcase, but she can kick some serious ass, and so can her co-star Dichen Lachman. Watching women kick ass and take names? I'm there. But I won't stay there unless I care about these characters, and I'm not really there yet. The fact that each character becomes a different character each week due to the personality implants and is completely personality free between jobs won't help either. I'll give it a few more episodes to see where it's going, but I really miss the ultra-sharp dialogue that Buffy had. None of Joss's shows after that have been nearly as much fun to listen to.
