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Alias - The Complete First Season

Alias - The Complete First Season

List Price: $69.99
Your Price: $52.49
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Awesome Yet Underrated Show!
Review: I don't know why this gets such low ratings. Everyone should be watching this show or at least buying it now that it's on DVD. It's an amazing action packed drama filled with smart, [beautiful] women and smart, sexy guys. Jennifer Garner, Victor Garber, David Anders, Ron Rifkin, and the dude that plays Marshall are all very good. The Will and Francie characters are very annoying and needy, although the Francie character gets interesting later on.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The hype fits.
Review: Yup. The fanboys don't lie. This is great television.
While not as throttling as "24", the breathless pacing is a delight.
Garner and Garber, as daughter-and-son, develop a "feels real" relationship across the year, and Rifkin (as Sloane) truly creates a character for the ages. Evil? Not so evil? The tightrope he dances reaches a crescendo by the final episdoe. It needs to be recognized by SOME professional organization one of these days.
All the secondary characters are note-perfect. Romantic tensions are well played-out.
This is not to say there aren't plot lapses. Or even plot holes. Shoot, there are whole plot canyons, but you're having WAY too much fun to even care!
The season actually gets better as it progresses...and the last episodes are masterworks. The last scene, I feel, is the best cliffhanger since 'Who Shot JR."
It's actually better. Easily.
I withheld seeing the show on TV so I could get the whole "mythology" at once on DVD. I must say it was worth the wait, and I can't wait for round 2!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Awesome entertainment.
Review: Having little interest in network programming (or TV in general), I missed the first season, but I was lucky enough to see some of the second season. I bought this box set of season one, and like some early John Grisham novels, I couldn't seem to put it down. The casting, the music, the WRITING, the sets, the widesreen HDTV presentation, etc. create a level of production quality that is unsurpassed in the TV industry. I am anxiously waiting for the DVD release of season two!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Alias is one of the best tv series ever!
Review: I only started catching Alias midway thru Season 2, which made it difficult to understand all the storylines going on in the first 2 seasons. So I bought the season 1 box set not knowing what to expect. I wound up becoming completely addicted to it. I spent two days straight watching all six dvds back to back. I was glued to the tv, I coudn't get enough of this show. At the end of each episode, I HAD to see the next one. It really hooks you in. Incredible. Every episode is movie quality and the story is so rich, it's the best value in entertainment. Alias and 24 (Kiefer Sutherland's) is IMO the best thing on TV. Way better than the reality TV [stuff] that the networks are trying to sell these days. It's proof that good stories, good actors, good production/direction is worth it. I hope Alias keeps it up. I have been a bit disappointed with how Season 3 is going, but I am optimistic that they will get the 'magic' back that they definitely had in Season 1. It's amazing that Alias was so good in it's very 1st season. Most shows take several seasons before the chemistry and storylines start to gel. They really set the bar high for themselves for everything that they do from now on. Here's hoping to many more great seasons from them. I also hope Jennifer Garner keeps the enthusiasm for this series that she shows in Season 1. She really deserved the Emmy for her great acting that year. This year, there hasn't been any of the multiple roles she used to do. There isn't the conflict between her secret agent life, and the young college student trying to make it life, which made season 1 so great. She seemed 'superhuman' as a secret agent, but then she had these normal day to day problems in her personal life that made her very real. The side stories with Will and Francie were great. They need to get those kind of story lines going again this season, or else Alias will fall into the pool of mediocre action series that are popping up trying to copycat Alias's success. Keep it up JJ Abrams, Garner, and the rest of the crew.


Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Season One rules!!
Review: Jennifer Garner is one of the best actresses out there. You won't be disappointed!!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Best show now on American TV
Review: "Alias" is a great show. It's also wildly implausible. Jennifer Gardner stars as Sydney Bristow: grad student by day, spy by night, and double agent in her spare time. She does all this while racking up a million frequent flyer miles a year. It's not surprising that she's unlucky in love and often an emotional basket case. But when she's in the middle of a mission Sydney's got cool that James Bond can't match (OK, maybe the Timothy Dalton Bond could keep up).

The ABC network has helped the series considerably with liberal deviation from the accepted hour show format. This began with an uninterrupted showing of the pilot when the series debuted: 66 minutes without commercial or other interruption, a nearly unheard-of occurrence in American TV. The following 21 episodes fit the standard 45 minutes of content for an "hour" show, but many ran for 15 or more minutes before the credits and first commercial break (in sharp contrast to the 2-3 minute convention before first ad break).

The star and special effects crew of "Alias" are constantly pushing the envelope. Jennifer Garner had minimal action show work under her belt when she started on the series. Garner could run and dance, but was keen to learn more. It soon became apparent to the writers and stunt crew that she was adept at memorizing: not just scripts, but also stunt choreography and foreign language phonetics. The foreign languages in "Alias" are much more compelling than the usual cheat of English with some phony foreign accent. Garner has since studied kickboxing and wire stunts, and actually looks forward to jumping off 100' buildings as a regular part of her job.

"Alias" is in many ways a very flawed show. The flaws do not keep it from being remarkably entertaining. There's lots of impossible spy gadgetry, but the Bond movies have made us come to expect that. No real spy agency would keep on an agent as prone to emotional collapse as Sydney Bristow, yet both SD-6 and the CIA consider her a valuable asset. The whole prophetic 15th century Milo Rambaldi technology schtick is WAY out there. And many of the effects over-reach. One particularly egregious example is the oft-shown exploding car sequence. The hood pops off and the car pitches up while fire lights it from below/behind. Since you can see through the engine compartment it's glaringly apparent that this stunt car did not, in fact, actually have an engine in it as it rolled down the road.

"Alias" show honchos have hedged their bets by going with known quantities where possible. Series creator J.J. Abrams worked with star Garner on "Felicity", and has known Greg Grunberg (a "Felicity" regular) since childhood. Kevin Weisman played a recurring role on "Felicity". (Amanda Foreman, another "Felicity" regular, shows up in seasons two and three.) Executive producer Ken Olin appears in a small recurring role, and his wife and "thirtysomething" costar Patricia Wettig also plays a recurring character on "Alias".

In the first season notable guest stars include Gina Torres, Quentin Tarantino, Angus Scrimm, Amy Irving, Lindsay Crouse, Terry O'Quinn, and Peter Berg.

"Alias" is written as a continuous story arc and few episodes end without leaving the viewer eager to see what comes next. The first season has plot threads involving Sydney's graduate school studies, her secret agent work for SD-6, her double agent work for the CIA, clueless best friends Will and Francie, the thaw in her relationship with her distant father, the mysterious Alliance, the prophetic works of Milo Rambaldi, and the growing question of what happened to her mother.

As Sydney's view of her mother changes, so does the casting. The character is played in the first season by Arabella Holzbog (in old photos), Natasha Pavlovich (in grainy surveillance footage), and April Webster in a quick backlit scene. The character gains major importance in the second season when played by Lena Olin.

It's not surprising that the show's producers and writers spend considerable time worrying about ways to bring viewers up to speed if they've missed or forgotten plot points. There's a lot going on in "Alias", and you don't want to blink sometimes for fear of being thrown off the roller-coaster.

The DVD first season collection of "Alias" is unremarkable for its packaging and extra content. This is mostly a good thing. The effort went into excellent video and audio transfer, and the menus are less annoying than most. Extra content is largely what they had lying around in the editing room: a few deleted scenes, and the ABC promo spots for a few episodes. Audio commentary was added in three of the 22 episodes, including the first and last.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Doesn't Disappoint!
Review: If you're an Alias fan and didn't get hooked till mid season, this is a must to get all the background. I didn't become hooked on this series until mid-year and thank goodness this DVD came out. Now, all the questions you may have had about any of the characters are answered. The best series in years!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Very Entertaining!
Review: I bought the first season and so far have found it very entertaining. Some things I find a bit ridiculous like going to recover a nuclear bomb, only having to deal with two guards, and then having sufficient time in a wide open warehouse to take the core out. Anyway, it's still fun to watch.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: BEST TELEVISION SHOW IN HISTORY
Review: Let's start by saying there is too many great things about this show to list them all here besides if i mentioned all of them it would ruin some of the fantastic suprises that await you on this show or should i say short movies. I have seen alot of action television shows and the reason i enjoyed this more than anything else is that it gets you away for an hour much like some of the movies do at the theatre for two i feel almost as if i have watched a motion picture after one of these episodes. The acting is so much better than anything i have seen now i look at these other shows and can't help noticing the poor acting going on. The entire cast is perfect and jennifer garner should win every emmy award until the show ends with the acting she has done on this show UNBELIEVABE not to mention the fantastic acting by the rest of the cast WOW. give this show a beyond perfect score it deserves more than the maximum five stars allowed if you have not seen it this dvd is perfect each episode is presented in anamorphic widescreen ( those who have widescreen tv's will be in heavan) and fantastic 5.1 surround sound along with some fantastic special features including a great gag reel and a very cool look into season two. So i urge you who have not seen this show rent or better yet buy this season now you will be on the edge of your seat from the moment it starts. And if jennifer garner or the writers of alias are reading this i just have to say sydney needs to hook up with vaughn soon. five stars fantastic show.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Worth the price but WHERE ARE THE SPECIAL FEATURES?
Review: This is a great boxset. I became a fan of Alias mid-way through the first season and never saw the first 2 episodes until I got the dvds. I really appreciate seeing them in chronological order. The brilliant casting is so apparent and the character development is wonderful to watch, particularly the relationship between Jennifer Garner and Victor Garber.

BUT--I have two complaints. Some of the scenes that take place at night or in shadowy basements (and that's a lot of them) seem very dark. I don't remember the shows looking this way when I originally watched them on television.

Number 2--the Amazon review mentions many special features including Marshall's gadget gallery and auditions. I don't find those two at all. Are they hidden Easter eggs? Will someone please help me?


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