FANeXpo 2012: revolution special screening

As part of the festivities on Day 2 of FANeXpo, CityTV was able and proud to present a "Canadian exclusive pre-screening" of the brand new J.J. Abram's series Revolution at 7PM in the big conference/screening room on the second floor of the convention (Room 701).

And yes, Revolution is this season's new show that I gushed about here.

It is poised to debut on television for the general public on September 17th, but like the nerd that I am, I decided that I was interested enough with this show to make this pre-screening what I term the "event of the weekend" - the one thing that I go out of my way to make sure that I get into.

Even though this convention hardly compares to Comi-Con, stuff like this still causes fans to start lines a good two to three hours in advance.

I showed up a good hour and a half before the show was supposed to start. And the line looked something like this.

About 15 minutes later, the line looked like this.

All told, it was the most watched screening in FANeXpo history so far, with people having to stand around doors in order to view the show.

Anyway, like all things at FANeXpo, the thing started a good twenty minutes late, apparently so to accommodate a special introduction by, as a girl in front of me called him all night long, "Bella's Dad" - a.k.a Canadian and Revolution star Billy Burke, who plays Miles Matheson.

He did indeed come in and say hi to the crowd.

On to the episode...

I found the pilot episode to be a cornucopia of interesting, fast moving and action packed events. You can certainly see the movie elements and mindset it drew from Abrams and director Jon Favreau in engaging its audience.

But when it was over, I had to say I was fairly disappointed in it.

You saw very little that you couldn't already figure out from the trailer.

Simply put, it was an elaboration - or an extension - of what was already shown in the trailer that was put out earlier this year by NBC.

Now it's not a put down of the series as a whole. As with all Abrams shows, he left many questions unanswered and didn't explain any of the pseudo-science involved in making this "phenomenon" possible. In a way, it's a means to keep his viewers watching in order to figure out the truth. And the concept is still very intriguing, while the characters (with what was seen so far) seems pretty solid and well-rounded.

But I thought they went about the whole thing the wrong way. The trailer should not have been what was a summary of the first episode, and if they really only had that first episode to build a trailer from, they could have certainly not have shown all the scenes at the end that revealed a number of things.

All in all, I will keep an eye on the series, but the first episode wasn't as earth-shattering as I had hoped it would be.