Sets, fight scenes, etc. are generally cheesy, indicating this has a small production budget.
This is Illinois? It sure looks like the South to me, judging by the vegetation and trees.
Swords: is it a good idea, really, to make the hilt of your blade be a brass knuckles, meaning your fingers are imprisoned in those holes, so you can't drop the blade or whatever if your enemy is turning the blade against your body?
Judging by what supposedly is going on when the lights go out, should there be powerful ministers and other religious figures everywhere?
Fifteen years since the world's power supply died, and everything is so very well organized already, particularly for agriculture, which is mostly mono-culture and doubtless infected with the one growing season only Big Agribiz genetically modified grains and cereals? Where are the wild dog packs and feral hogs attacking your domestic animals and tearing up your fields (as wild hogs are doing even now)? That everyone remains so well dressed is potentially plausible because there should be so much stock around, while the population must have precipitously dropped -- at least it is implied the population has dropped so much. (But really? That AC / DC t-shirt has survived 15 years of hard wearing and washing? Did men who never have dealt with laundry and buying clothes dress these characters?) Same with hair products, and surely hair stylists survived so they can do hair cuttery in their spare time from growing food. But dental and optical corrections don't seem as likely since these are so dependent on very high tech all run by electricity.
While we learn enormous amounts about weaponry, warlords, militias and division of territories, what is the economy? What is passing for money? With whom and where do we trade? Why are we told that Europe doesn't exist .... surely if we can get the technology together to successfully raise, train and equip horses for soldiers, we can build ocean going ships? Or -- is it we've destroyed the forests long ago that provide the sort of lumber that you need for ocean going ships? Yet they've got the big boats necessary for Great Lakes fishing.
OK, this is Illinois. How come there are only white people and black people? No Native Americans, no Asians of any background? Where the gay members of the community?
Why is this post-apocalypse so danged healthy and homogenous? Where are the members who have lost their legs or have received or been born with various physical challenges? Where the children born with Downs Syndrome or Aspergers?
Also, revolution, secession and civil wars don't happen by accident. In the U.S. very powerful, very wealthy people made all three, so surely the same is the case here. (In this way the San Domingue Slave Revolution, and,for another example, the Vietnamese Revolution, were unlike the U.S. revolution.) Who are these people -- or, in other words, what was in it for them? One must ask these questions because they are thrown in our face, with the terminology of 'rebels' and 'patriots,' with the U.S. flag, rather than the stars and bars as representing the rebels, and the militias' uniforms right out of the U.S. Civil War. (And who makes these uniforms and out of what? Military uniforms made by hand, which many were in the Civil War, were hard to do, and also very lucrative contracts -- government contracts. The competition for them was great, as former slave Elizabeth Keckley
describes in her book, Behind the Scenes, when she and brother achieve one of those contracts.
There are many episodes still ahead for this watcher in the first season of Revolution. * Though obviously I've got lots of problems with the series, I'm willing to continue. Doubtless there are better informed viewers who know the answers to all these questions too. Still, it seems to this viewer, if somehow some of this could have been overtly included in the limited screen time, even such a low-budget series would overall be a lot more interesting with rather more content. Instead, they've opted for including at least one prolonged fight-it-out scene in each episode to eat up what time they've got. Grrr.
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* Is this going to be another Lost or X-Files? If so, then they've lost me for certain.
