This is a highly watchable three-part American TV mini-series about the Bermuda Triangle. If it were not for the corny title sequences, cheap models, and some inferior production design of historical reconstruction scenes, the series could be described as very good indeed. All the live-action filming of modern material is excellent. Sam Neill is extremely good as a rich shipowner who is haunted by the image of his lost twin brother who disappeared in the Triangle (Neill has also lost several ships and has commercial reasons for wanting to crack the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle). We often see shots of Neill staring into a mirror, with no one behind him, but the lost brother's face staring out of the mirror at him over his shoulder. Spooky! The main story itself is rather quirky and different, not a hackneyed approach at all. Neill hires an odd bunch of four impoverished researchers at $5 million apiece to try to solve the mystery of why ships, planes, and people keep disappearing inside the Triangle, and have been doing so since Columbus's time. The leading player is lean, freckle-faced, and eccentric Erik Stolz as an investigative journalist. He can hold a series together because he has lots of oomph. The most fascinating of the cast is Bruce Davison, who is absolutely superb at looking like a pasty-faced haunted psychic who really can see into the other world and never stops doing so. He has just the right expression in every scene. Of course, my favourite cast member was cutie Catherine Bell, the only gal in the team of four. She seems to be slightly cross-eyed, which never hurt an actress wanting attention, and has a very whimsical and appealing manner about her. One uncontrollably wants to give her a nudge and a wink, so that the lack of two-way communication when viewing her can be frustrating. She was definitely a successful bit of casting. The fourth team member is played by Michael E. Rodgers, who does very well as a scientist. In fact, this series works because the team of four is well cast and pulls it off. One major structural story weakness to the series is that the character Meeno, excellently played by Lou Diamond Phillips, takes two and a half episodes to get involved in the plot. It is a major mistake to give him such a time-consuming buildup for two and a half episodes, in which he does very well indeed, but leaving him hanging for all that time as a loose thread who just dangles and puzzles the viewer for far too long. That was very clumsy and misconceived. Another irritating aspect of the series is that we have yet again the most common and wholly unsympathetic stock character of all American series and films for the past twenty years, the embittered and angry ex-wife. We also have an embittered and angry wife. Sometimes I think I will scream if I see another American movie or series with one of those divorced harpies screaming at a pathetic ex-husband and withholding the child from him while she humps a hunk. They are all the same, and if they are half as common in real life as they are in modern American films, there would seem to be no hope for social life in the USA. After all, if all the women in America these days are embittered and angry, it is no wonder no one can find a job, as who would want to hire one of those grumbling, narcissistic, vitriolic harridans? I would say director Craig R. Baxley did a very good job with an under-budgeted series. As for the story itself, it gets pretty wild. Eventually the Philadelphia Experiment of the disappearing American naval ship from the 1940s comes into it and we hear a lot about time and space and wormholes. Thank God UFOs are left out of it. People dive a lot and pilot planes a lot and do daring things, all to be expected. Terrible storms with flashing lightning assail everyone on all sides, coming out of another time dimension. Parallel universes intersect with a crash and a bang. Navy planes that disappeared during World War II suddenly come flying into contemporary skies and almost crash into modern planes. People prematurely age, and a girl of six becomes a woman of 80 in three days. And no, this is not because they were saving on film stock. The poor woman is locked up by the Navy, who are the villains of the piece because they are trying to manipulate space and time by reversing the Philadelphia Experiment, which might bring all those sunken ships back up to the surface, and all the crashed planes back into the sky, and dead men back to life. The US Navy has built a secret base beneath the sea within the Triangle and is trying to do all these secret things, thereby putting the world in peril, and the team of four, by that time joined by Meeno, whose Greenpeace colleagues all drowned in the Triangle, have to stop the world being destroyed by preventing the reversal effect. It all gets very nerve-wracking, and I felt lucky to survive the viewing, what with all those sci fi threats to my safety.
Review of The Triangle
