Taken

Review

For those of you that may not know, Taken was a ten-part min Sci-Fi series that was made for TV with each episode running for around 90 Minutes. The series was basically a story of alien abductions; the story itself follows three families over a 50-year time span. From the skies of France during WWII, right through to the modern day.

Firstly there’s the Keys family, during WWII Russell Keys (and many other pilots) experience strange lights in the sky during the middle of a heated aerial battle. From that moment on Russell and his heirs are continually abducted by the Aliens for reasons unknown to them.

Secondly there’s the Clarke family, when unhappily married Sally Clarke takes in a lodger she quickly becomes very attracted to him. She has an affair with him and becomes pregnant with his child, she then discovers that the lodger is not of this world and the child is sent into hiding to prevent the government getting hold of him. The generations of Clarke’s to come are all going to be a little special.

Finally there’s the Crawford family, Owen Crawford is an ambitious Air Force captain who stumbles upon a crashed alien vessel. From this moment on the Crawford family is determined to get to the bottom of the Alien mystery and will let nothing or no one stand in the way of their work and their ultimate quest for answers.

I know there are some on the forums that will disagree with me (I’m looking at you Matt), but I really enjoyed Taken when it recently aired on the BBC. Given the rather daunting 15 hours of runtime the program unsurprisingly moves at a fairly gentle pace with plenty of time spent on character development. It takes many abduction stories, conspiracy theories and so on that we here about today and adapts them into the program.

If your looking for an action packed Sci-Fi spectacular then your probably going to be disappointed as Taken is more about people than Aliens. Special effects are used fairly sparingly and there are some episodes where the Aliens barely even have a role to play.

Although I enjoyed it I should say that the series isn’t perfect. By it’s very nature characters change quite a lot through the series as generations of the families flow. Unfortunately some of the characters towards the end of the series are just not as strong as those in the beginning. Also as so often happens with a Speilberg influenced show, the sentimentality does start to bog things down towards the end.

Video

The series is presented in its original 16:9 format. Picture quality is excellent throughout with no sign of artefacts or blemishes. Compared to the relatively low bit rate of the BBC digital broadcast this print is a joy to watch. Colours are bold and the image is nice and sharp.

Audio

I found myself a little disappointed with the Dolby Digital 5.1 EX remix contained here. Not that there’s anything majorly wrong with it, in fact overall it sounds great with atmosphere by the bucket load. The main reason I was a little disappointed is that it didn’t seem to have quite enough base in places. The opening WWII scene and the UFO crash were two particular scenes where I noticed this.

Extras

And so we come onto the extras, this won’t take very long as I’m disappointed to say that there is in fact only one extra. The first five disks contain nothing but two episodes each. Disk 6 is the “bonus features” disk and contains one 42 minute or so making of feature called “Inside Taken”. The feature itself is actually very good, and contains lots of background information to the making of the series, interviews with cast and crew, discussions with the script writer and of course Mr Speilberg himself.

Unfortunately though that is all you get, nothing as grand as a commentary is included, we don’t even get a simple trailer.

Overall

Both I and my other half really enjoyed this mini series when it recently aired on TV. It’s not perfect, as I mentioned earlier the sentimentality gets laid on a bit heavy towards the end. Despite this though the series is well worth watching even if you’re not a hard core Sci-Fi nut.

Presentation wise the DVD box set delivers in spades, the video quality is excellent and the 5.1 audio remix is great. It’s a shame that there’s so little effort on the extras side as let’s face it the box set is not exactly cheap. Gripes aside though, this is a quality DVD release and well worth purchasing if you’re a fan of the show.