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Billionaire Eric Benirall is losing his cargo ships and their
crews at a frightening pace - and he wants answers. His bemused,
hand-picked team of subject-specific experts include sceptical
tabloid journalist Howard Thomas, ocean resource engineer
Emily Patterson, scientist/adventurer Bruce Geller and psychic
Stan Lathem. Recruited with the promise of unlimited funding
for their research and the chance for once-in-a-lifetime riches,
the team sets out to solve this most daunting of puzzles...
Before
I get to the main review of this DVD I wanted to offer a bit
of background on the legend of the Bermuda Triangle, as well
as explain why the stories seem to have vanished, mysteriously,
from the media in the last 30 years.
The
Bermuda Triangle represents nearly a half-million square-mile
area of ocean roughly defined by Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and
the southern tip of Florida. The term "Bermuda Triangle"
was first penned by Vincent H. Gaddis in an article for Argosy
magazine in 1964.
Sadly,
a lot of the legend is pure cobblers - fuelled by lazy journalists
and authors who haven't bothered to do their homework properly.
Many of the vessels that are claimed to have vanished in calm
seas did nothing of the sort. In 1975 Larry Kusche, a librarian
at Arizona State University, became intrigued by the legend
and took it upon himself to investigate the claims made by
many of the published books and magazine articles. His results
can be read in a book entitled The
Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved. He discovered
that on frequent occasions when a writer had given an account
of a ship or plane that had disappeared in calm seas that
the actual official records showed that a raging storm had
been in progress. More digging revealed that many of the mysteriously
vanished ships and planes had done nothing of the sort. Their
remains had been found and the cause of the accident had been
officially explained.
In
1975 the editor of Fate went through Lloyd's of London's
accident records and discovered that the Bermuda Triangle
was a no more dangerous part of the ocean than any other.
A quick check of the U.S. Coast Guard records confirmed this
and since the '70s the Bermuda Triangle mystery disappeared...
mysteriously - until now.
Okay,
history lesson over. The Triangle mini-series is an
intriguing piece of TV science fiction that while 30 years
too late in the making, is actually rather entertaining. It
is
one of those rare US television events - a mini-series that
has no (or almost no) chance of being turned into a spin-off
series. This is quite impressive - that the studio stumped
up the cash for a made for TV production that, if popular,
can't be expanded upon very easily.
In
fact, after listening to Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich's
remarks on the audio commentary of the
Stargate DVD, I actually
wondered if Devlin deliberately orchestrated this series so
that it was near impossible to make a spin-off TV show on
the back of it. For those of you who haven't heard that audio
commentary, basically the two skirt around their dislike of
the more popular Stargate: SG-1 TV series.
The
acting is near faultless with Eric
Stoltz, Catherine Bell, Bruce Davison, Lou Diamond Phillips,
Michael Rodgers and Sam Neill all being wonderfully cast.
A loved the fact that the main group was not Benirall's originally
choice - that he'd already approached much more qualified
and disciplined experts in each field, but that they had all
dismissed his proposal as the quest of a mad man.
This
mini-series also touches on the myth that is the Philadelphia
Experiment. For those unaware of the background to this, it
is claimed that in 1943, as part of an experiment into electronic
camouflage, the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Eldridge was
made invisible and teleported from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
to Norfolk, Virginia and then back again in a flash. On returning
to Philadelphia it was discovered that some of the crew were
violently sick, others had vanished never to be heard from
again, some went crazy, and five men were fused within the
ship's structure. It was interesting to see the writers link
this myth into the plot.
I
said earlier that it would be difficult to make this into
an ongoing series, but personally I think that they could
spin this off into a TV show. Skip the rest of this paragraph
if you don't want a big clue how this series concludes...
Without giving too much away, an ongoing series could easily
use a Stargate:SG-1 type format, but instead of travelling
through space they could go through time.
For
some strange reason the episodes are entitled Night 1,
2 and 3. This is a little strange because very
little of the action takes place at night, and the majority
of this series is set during daylight hours.
Extras
are a little lacking. All we get is a "Making of"
featurette and rather uninteresting interviews with the main
cast.
At
the end of the day, The Triangle is pretty entertaining
viewing and certainly worth adding to your DVD collection.
Darren
Rea
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