Twin Peaks: The Return, Episodes 1 & 2
Review by Paul Preston
Welcome to Today I Watched…, a series of posts documenting my new challenge – watch a movie a day for the rest of my life. Keep coming back to TheMovieGuys.net to find out what I watch each day…and get my take on it.
When I see a movie that’s a new release in theaters or on demand, I’ll give it a proper review in the “Reviews” or “Home Viewing”, otherwise, I’ll write about it here.
May 21, 2017 – Twin Peaks: The Return, Episodes 1 & 2
I know, this is a TV show, but the first two episodes of the return of David Lynch’s quirky 1990s murder mystery felt more like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, so I’m counting it as a movie. I LOVED the television series and I remember going to Fire Walk With Me excited for more of the oddball characters of the cursed town of Twin Peaks and what I got was Laura Palmer crying for two hours. I was really, really disappointed. There are loads of articles on the web now about the brilliance of Fire Walk With Me and how it re-establishes Laura Palmer as more of a woman going down with a fight against the forces of evil as opposed to the victim wrapped in plastic we see in the TV pilot. I can appreciate that. But I did far more than “appreciate” the TV series, so the film will always hold a spot in my head that it was a bit of a letdown.
Showtime’s new reboot of Twin Peaks feels like an extension of the movie, giving David Lynch and Mark Frost rope to create an onslaught of feelings and auras, but I don’t see a thru-line murder mystery keeping it all together. In fact, for a show called Twin Peaks, there’s very little time spent there in the pilot episodes, which jump between New York City, Las Vegas, South Dakota and the infamous Black Lodge. It almost feels as if Lynch is still rallying against Showtime for jerking his budget around (causing him to quit once) by delivering up the most nonsensical version of Twin Peaks he could muster.
I just hope there are moments like Maddy’s death or Leland’s death from the original series, moments of real, raw emotion and power. Those signature scenes made all the weird shit worthwhile, and it vindicated the weird shit. The weird shit was, in the end, feeding and leading up to the significant and SATISFYING moments. The upside is as bizarre as it may seem now, they’ve got a long eighteen weeks to work it all out.
