Hacker Cinema
Another Life
2019 · TV series · 45 min episodes · 2 seasons
Created by Aaron Martin
After a massive alien artifact lands on Earth, Niko Breckinridge leads an interstellar mission to track down its source and make first contact.
1 positive5 negative1 neutralfrom 7 commenters
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7 comments on Hacker News
What Netflix needs is pilot episodes instead of straight to series orders. Some of the shows that get greenlit and get minimum one season are so bad that if they had any kind of pilot/quality control process they'd never make it on beyond episode one (and thus release resources for multiple seasons of the shows they cancel or a good quality new shows). I watch some Netflix shows (eg Another Life/The I-Land) and wonder how they ever get made, it's like no one is paying attention.
They also need to give shows some kind of ending even if they are not part of their long term plans. Having a library of shows without ending is not attractive to customers.
AppleTV has been running circles around Netflix (and other streaming services when it comes to quality), what is the last critically acclaimed series on Netflix? I am not saying that your shows need to be critically acclaimed but you can't be in a state where your shows are getting panned criticlaly and on top of that not giving endings to your semi popular shows.
> Also, consider all the potentially great films that never got made because even the best filmmakers can only get a fraction of their ideas actually produced.
and that's a good thing.
Consider how many bad movies were not made thanks to this!
IMO, content creation should be harder, not easier.
If it becomes too easy, the quality goes toward hobbyist level, which is not what I want to pay for.
Also, bad content was a thing on its own, take for example Troma films, they are entertainingly bad, not just repetitive and dull bad.
> Or the problem of finding something satisfying to watch out literally tens of thousands of shows on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, AppleTV+, etc?
the problem is exactly the mass amount of content created to lure people in.
But do I really want to watch another iteration of the superhero trope?
No, I don't.
I wanna watch something that I've never seen before.
Imagine a book written to mimic the style of my favourite writers on my favourite topic: Sci-fi.
On paper it sounds like a dream, but in reality it would be a terrible, confusing, incoherent and ultimately a trying-too-hard-to-match-my-taste product.
Like when Data reads his poems on TNG and when asked why people seemed distracted, Laforge answers "Well, your poems were clever, Data, and your Haiku was clever, and your sonnet was clever. But did it evoke an emotional response? To be honest, no"
Of course Data being Data, he knows he's clever and he knows he's an amateur poet and wants to hear the truth about his works.
But do we want to pay for content generated by the machines so that they can learn to imitate us better? [1]
I sincerely don't want to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
EDIT: with [1] I mean that I don't want to pay streaming content publishers to improve their algorithm so that they can mass produce more dull content for people to consume (and pay)
If they really want to improve things, they should pay people to make less shows and/or movies but better.
Shows like "Another life" (6% on Rotten Tomatoes) would not exist if they were shot on real sets that take time, money, permits and a lot people to recreate.
Wasn't Campion's Power of the Dog an Oscar-rated Netflix film? I agree overall however, Apple is competing with the legacy content monsters the right way. Severance was great art, Slow Horses is compelling, Foundation had its issues but also better moments than any Netflix Sci-Fi show I've seen the past few years (Nightflyers, Another Life, etc don't even come close), and For All Mankind is well-written.
I've been doing vfx for 20+ years. So...
- watch a movie :
2020 Upside Down Magic
2017 The Fate of the Furious (visual effects artist)
2015 San Andreas
2015 Avengers: Age of Ultron
2013 R.I.P.D.
2011 Happy Feet Two
2011 Mars Needs Moms
2009 A Christmas Carol
2008 The Tale of Despereaux
2007 Enchanted
2006 The Shaggy Dog
2005 Constantine
2004 Hellboy
2003 The Matrix Revolutions
2001 Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
- or a more recent TV show:
Another Life
Gabby and the Unsittables
Charmed
There's certainly other things I've worked on, but they're lost down the memory hole for good.
https://old.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/cj4rrp/was_another_life_scifi_series_on_netflix_made_bad/
Netflix's "Another Life" was so bad that people wonder if it was made bad on purpose. It was absolutely awful, and anyone that thinks it was good loses any credibility about what's good or bad sci-fi.
And I've been developing webpages for many decades, and even worked quite a long time at a precursor to what Netflix is today - yes, an online movie streaming service. So please don't talk down to me like I don't know what any of this is about. You're seriously wasting your time explaining any of that to me.
I think it's the novelty of it. Friends with kids report losing their minds after sitting through the nth replay of a Disney movie. To the kid, everything in it is new and they enjoy seeing new details each time. The adult can guess their way through any new Disney movie because they all stick close to a formula anyone with a passing interest in writing can recite.
I did the same rewatching all the Star Treks, Stargates, and other '90s sci-fi TV several times. Now it's kind of...dull. It's all too familiar. Now I'm more impressed with newer scifi that tries to evolve the genre without being too different. Like: The Expanse, Farscape, Dark Matter, Another Life.
I've been astonished at the amount of originals that I've seen while I browsed Netflix the other day. The quality though has been very varied though. I watched the first episode of Another Life and I think it is the single worst first episode of TV I have seen. It will be very interesting to see which streaming platform will prevail in the end with so many big players entering, I wonder if the key to "winning" is having the high quality series or a myriad of mediocre choice?