5ive Days to Midnight revolves around college professor J.T. Neumeyer, who stumbles upon a mysterious briefcase containing a police file filled with details of a gruesome murder — his own. The file, complete with photos of his bullet-strewn corpse and a list of suspects, indicates that the shooting will take place in five days.
J.T. is skeptical at first, but when events begin to mirror those in the report, he realizes that the file is genuine — and that his time is quickly running out. He has only days to solve the mystery of his own murder and, hopefully, change the course of the future.
If you get the sci-fi channel, but haven't seen this, it's pretty easy to catch up. The channel is airing repeat episodes pretty often.
Thus far, Diane and I are pretty entertained by it. Enough so that I have promised to tape the shows tonight and tomorrow night for her while she's out of town.
I've been watching it. I like it but it seems a little weird. The way they introduced the case with that weird bubble thing that was reminiscent of Time Cop seemed a little incongruous. It made you believe it really was from the future before JT did. I'd rather find out when the main character does.
Sikorsky is great. Randy Quaid is doing a great job with him. The little girl looks sooooo much like Drew Barrymore as a little girl. Claudia/Angela is gorgeous and great so far. Roy Bremmer (played by that guy who played "the Bruce" in Braveheart) was pretty cool, too. Just a great job casting.
JT doing the ballistics test in his basement was a realistic thing for a physicist to do. I'm glad the writers included that. What I don't like is that JT did not ask to see the equations and physics explanations from Axelrod when Axelrod told him that JT had to die. A physics teacher would totally be interested in how he came to that conclusion.
The carbon nano-tubes thing was cool. The guy cycling while drinking hard liquor was bizarre. I think it would have taken years for the guy to reverse engineer the tubes. It would not have saved him from being bankrupt.
I get distracted because the thing is s'posed to be occurring in Seattle, and I know Seattle, in particular Univ. of Wash. where JT is s'posedly teaching, and that is SO not the physics building. At least they had JT coming out of the Snohomish County Sheriff's office (I think he's s'posedly living in Everett?)
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Also, they seemed to play up the whole figuring out the combo thing waaaaaaaaaaay too much. A six digit number naturally presents itself as a date. The fact that he found it at his wife's gravesite would imply that the date is the day of his wife's death, especially since everyone knew how much that day had weighed on him before Claudia had entered his life. The whole floating number thing was interesting but over the top.
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I agree with a lot of your critique - unable to judge the locale-specific elements, though.
I would also have preferred a setup in which we, the viewers, were uncertain about the package's authenticity until J.T. was.
We also figured out the combination to the case before J.T. did.
And yes - the daughter is SO reminiscent of a young Drew Barrymore the casting has to have been intentional.
I like these kinds of stories - is destiny malleable? It seems to me there has to be a possibility of averting fate here or the package wouldn't have been sent in the first place.
Unless, of course, it was sent simply because it was sent all along in one of those causal loop paradox thingies.
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So far, JonnyNotSoBravo's posts are the only ones that contain much in the way of spoilage - and he put a warning on.
My posts contain a little plot info, but nothing beyond what TV listings and commercials gave out before the first show.
I've watched the first three hours and I like it so far. It's not great TV - but it's pretty good and I'm waiting to see what they do with the ending, which could be very crucial in how I end up feeling about the time I've devoted to watching.
In other words, if they do something tired and predictable, my opinion of the miniseries as a whole will suffer.
If they manage to be clever or introduce something original - some interesting twist - at the end, my current positive feelings will be reinforced.
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