Last night bestie and I watched the trilogy and for me personally it was my first watch since the first I'd seen it years ago.
Now just about everyone here knows that I am not a fan of the trilogy story and that has remained mostly unchanged.
It has the unfitting feel of a Stephan King novel, especially this first episode and child Abigail is a horrid brat! That much of my original opinion stands.
Starting with a Stephen King factor she had this eerie moment where after Sam and Al have a conversation in Clayton's bedroom and he follows this flash he gets of Laura out into the hall, she's standing there with this haunting stare and says "Night daddy". Then turns and walks away. What the hell?!
And let's back track to that Laura thing, what was that? Then there is a second occurrence during the fire. In the third episode the camera focuses on her hand when she reveals the missing locket and you can see that it's burned. Sam then removes her head dressing long enough to reveal that she'd lost nearly all her hair and a burned scalp. This is suggestive that she'd been there in that fire. Returning to this episode, right before Lita Aider drops the lantern she can be heard crying out for someone not to hurt her and I'd automatically assumed she was faking being attacked by Abigail like the vicious b**** she is but could she have been yelling at Laura?
This doesn't add up for me though. When Sam caught sight of her there she'd disappeared in the blink of an eye, how is that possible and how on earth did she get out of the mental facility and to the house with somewhat suggestively no witnesses?
The 'Tell me all the ways you love me' bits were attention seeking clingy daddy's girl behavior and the way she b****ed to Sam that she was done discussing the incident with Violet was...well b****y and should have been reprimanded. Sam was the father he should have taken her firmly by the shoulders and told her:
"You do not talk to you father like that young lady! You were the last one to see the Aiders alive, do you understand what that means!? The accusations you're facing? We need to talk about this, I need to know exactly what happened if you want to convince people that you're innocent!"
He can be forgiven though because the situation, unlike anything he's ever heard of before had him kind of in a level of shock for most of the duration of the leap. Al conveniently missed all of Abigail's tantrum moments or I feel like he would have made a comment there. I'm reminded of the backstory bestie gave him and if it were canon I could imagine him saying:
"At the orphanage if we talked to the nuns like that we'd get a good smacking."
On this subject, it seemed like the Violet story was slightly altered when she tells it again as an adult in the third part. In the first version the fight seemed to be equally about the locket and then escalated to Abigail being crazy while in the second version she made it sound mostly about the locket. Which leads me to my next point, while it's true that children fight over trivial things because it's all they've got, I didn't find it real believable that a little girl would beat the **** out of another little girl over a locket and it actually supports that's she's the little psycho the town thought she was. Now if they were boys it would be different, violent psychical fighting is more of a boy thing. Then again I didn't find anything in this episode believable so that was kind of meaningless to point out. There was also a large missing link between the Violet story and Lita Aider almost strangling Abigail over getting that locket back; other than the fact that she'd wanted it what evidence was there that Abigail took the locket? Violet's body was missing for 25 years so there's no way Lita knew it was missing from around her neck.
Now returning to that fire, I was told that there is an original script in which Sam actually did NOT leap out in time and died but that doesn't make sense to me. How then did he leap from there into Abigail's nether regions unharmed? I'd like to know more about this, it's very intriguing.
There is no denying that the acting in all three episodes is wonderful. The Lita Aider character actually has a lot of similar aspects to the crazy woman in The Mist who was obsessed with God and preached the signs of the apocalypse from the bible. It is bestie's suggestion that Lita Aider's belief in family curses could be religion based along with it being the south in the 50's. This returns me to how I feel this story is very Stephen King. The Mist happens to be King and one of my favorites of his films (The only of his writing I have read is two of his novellas).
One positive thing I'll admit is that I enjoy seeing Sam as a father though it's also saddening because he'll never be a father to his own children and with a heart that would make him a great one. :cry
To be continued in Trilogy part 2 thread.