ABC’s The River – CliqueClack Preview

I caught the pilot episode of ABC’s The River many months ago, watching it again just the other night. As I was watching it the second time, it dawned on me that, earlier this month, I had gone a a semi-rant about found-footage movies over on CliqueClack Flicks. The thing is, while I may have sounded as though I have a particular distaste for found-footage movies and TV, there are times it’s pulled off quite well and it works for me … but not often. The River is shot in this documentary/found-footage format a-la The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. While the story itself is so far pretty interesting, this particular filming style might be its undoing.

The premise of The River is rather unique. Emmet Cole (Bruce Greenwood) — the star of a very long-running reality series (think Discovery Channel) called The Undiscovered Country — suddenly goes missing during an on-location shoot in the Amazon. After six months of no success in finding him or the crew of his largish river boat, the search is called off. Cole’s wife, Tess (Leslie Hope) learns of some evidence that may prove her husband is alive, and she convinces their son Lincoln (Joe Anderson) to join her and a documentary crew to find Emmet. The entire story is brought to us via whatever the attending (and very nosy) filming crew happen to record, as well as through some other clever camera placement where it makes sense cameras might be. We quickly learn in the show’s first two hours that a lot of frightening crap went down on board Emmet’s ship, The Magus, and everyone’s now sucked into one hell of a voodoo-like nightmare.

The first time I watched the show’s pilot, I got to a point in the episode where I was getting a tad annoyed with the filming style. As I said, I’m not necessarily averse to the idea of this kind of filmmaking, but it has to be done right. What’s “done right?” Well, for starters, I don’t want to see any loopholes. In this episode, there are a couple of scenes in particular where I was a bit pissed off that they were unaddressed by the characters. For example, there’s a stationary camera that we’re led to understand is constantly recording one particular area, yet we get a moment when an event occurs and — wouldn’t you know it — the possibility the event was recorded is blown off entirely. Another moment came where the cameraman closes up on some obvious bloody claw marks, and it’s never mentioned as being, y’know, a bit effed up and maybe they should get the hell out of there.

There are a few decent moments that remind me of The Blair Witch Project, particularly with some “what the hell is that?!” scenes that the director hopes will get viewer to inch ever closer to the screen, only to scare the bejeezus out of them with some quick, sudden and obscured movement. They sort-of worked, but then again we’ve all seen these kinds of movies at this point, so it’s hard not to see it coming.

While I’m interested in seeing how the rest of the series plays out, I’m afraid its filming technique could grow old on a lot of viewers. If the pilot has some loopholes — even if you consider them minor ones — then what does that say about how subsequent episodes might fare down the road? Will they get too “convenient” with their placement of cameras — or lack thereof — in order to tell their story without ruining surprises, or can they pull it off cleverly enough not to cause us to have to dismiss these instances as artistic license in order to move things along without telling us too much too soon?

The River premieres February 7th on ABC.

Clacked by Keith McDuffee
on Jan 28, 2012 @ 21:49 EST5EDT