Harsh Realm : The Ultimate Mind Game - The Complete Series (Three-Disc Collector's Edition)

great scfi series and shipper packed well and it arrived fast.

Chris Carter's third show was never allowed to develop from its short appearance due to a miserable marketing campaign on the part of the Fox network. I am a fan of Chris Carter's work, and had been eagerly awaiting the premiere of this show. Surprisingly, I had a difficult time trying to find out when the show would be premiering, since Fox was not promoting it. By accident, I tuned in on the night of the series premiere, and caught the tail end of the prologue. Fox claims that the numbers weren't there for the premiere, and cancelled the show after just three episodes. It's unrealistic to think that viewers would tune in when there's no advertisement for the show. As such Harsh Realm suffered from the harsh realities of marketing gone wrong. I think Harsh Realm had another thing going against it: it was the replacement of Chris Carter's second series Millennium, which had started to develop a loyal fan base. Millennium was and still is a remarkable show, and I believe a lot of the fans, including myself, expected an equally remarkable show as a successor. So, at the beginning, Harsh Realm had big shoes to fill. The series pilot was not the best of Chris Carter's work (except for the final scene of the episode, when the viewer realizes how widespread the problem is), though the story had only just started. The two subsequent episodes continued to reveal the plot that was introduced in the pilot. Only after the third episode "Inga Fossa" is there enough told to proceed to the first stand-alone episode. Unfortunately, until the FX cable network debuted these episodes a year later did anyone get the chance to see the remaining 6 episodes of the series. I have seen some of the remaining six episodes that aired later on FX. They are very good in production quality, and the plot device of a virtual reality landscape allows the writers a lot of creative freedom to place the characters in very unusual circumstances. Perhaps, the best of them is the eighth episode "Cinncinnati", where the audience finally gets a real taste for how evil and committed the series' villain, Omar Santiago, is. His quest for supreme domination and the establishment of his fascist society shows its true colors. The two main characters: Hobbes (Scott Bairstow) and Pinnochio (D.B. Sweeney) are essentially polar opposites. Hobbes is the good all-American soldier, which for the most part makes him a caricature of sorts, though he does have some shining moments. Pinnochio is not a bad guy, he's honorable, but he's also jaded and his loyalties are questionable at times. This makes him a much more interesting character than Hobbes, and it is a shame we didn't get the chance to see his character develop. As for the other players: Florence (the mute healer/soldier), Sophie (Hobbe's fiance), Inga Fossa (the duplicitous informant), Waters (Hobbes former friend turned enemy) and Omar Santiago (a Hitler-esque fascist dictator)...they make their contributions here and there, but we never got to learn too much about them. The only real exception being Santiago who gets fleshed out very well in "Cinncinnati". This was not one Chris Carter's finest moments, but it may have developed into something special if given the time. Millennium, too, had a rocky start, but found it's loyal viewers. Perhaps, on DVD, it will be given the opportunity to shine for the first time. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing these episodes on DVD, and the various extras provided within the boxset. "It's just a game..."

In 1999, Chris Carter was on a roll. THE X-FILES was still going strong, and the superb but serially underrated MILLENNIUM hadn't yet been canceled. Approached by Fox to put together another series, he borrowed loosely from a graphic novel of the same name to create HARSH REALM, one of the most miscast and mismanaged good ideas anyone ever had. This is a series that had positively staggering potential, but was not understood or properly promoted by the studio, and was not entirely baked before Carter took it out of the oven. As a result, it died a very quick, extremely unlamented death and is almost entirely forgotten. But fans of Carter's work, of later 90s-early '00s television, and of science-fiction/genre-bending TV series will definitely want to give it a viewing.Released after THE MATRIX, but in gestation well before THE MATRIX hit theaters, REALM is the story of Lt. Tom Hobbes (Scott Bairstow), a U.S. Army officer fresh from bitter fighting in Kosovo, who is tapped by his superiors to enter Harsh Realm, a virtual reality program “created by the U.S. Army, programmed to minutely replicate the real world for training simulations.” Harsh Realm is basically The Matrix: a computer-generated world which is utterly indistinguishable from the real one, populated by "V.C.'s" (virtual characters based on their real-life counterparts). The VC's do not know they are characters in a simulation, and live and die believing they are real. Hobbes' missionis simple: he is to enter the Realm, locate, and assassinate a digital opponent named Santiago (Terry O'Quinn), and his superior (Lance Henriksen, in a tongue-in-cheek cameo) assures him it's all perfectly safe and harmless. When he enters the simulation, however, he discovers the virtual world in a chaotic, dystopian state, and even worse, quickly realizes that any real person who dies in the Realm really dies. Furious over being lied to, but unable to escape and reconnect with his beloved fiance Sophie Green (Samantha Mathis), he tries to carry out his mission, picking up along the way a foul-mouthed mercenary companion named Pinocchio (D.B. Sweeny), who is also "real" but for reasons of his own has no desire to leave Harsh Realm. They are soon joined by Florence (Rachael Hayward), a seemingly mute V.C. who has mysterious powers of healing linked to what might be called a glitch in the matrix.This trio, often at odds, pursue differing agendas while trying to kill the elusive Santiago, who has set himself up as a messianic warlord in Harsh Realm and plans to destroy the real world via nuclear holocaust, so he can reign supreme in the “virtual” world. Santiago is assisted by two people from the real world who now live primarily within the Realm: Hobbes' former friend Maj. Waters (Max Martini), a man of nebulous loyalties, and Inga Fossa (Sarah-Jane Redmond), a woman of nebulous agenda. In the mean time, Sophie, who has been told that Hobbes was killed in action, tries desperately to discover what really happened to her husband, placing her in danger.Anyone familiar with Chris Carter's work will recognize his trademarks here: Vancouver setting, superb cinematography and lighting, stylized (often wooden) dialogue, dark conspiracies, and an ill-defined but fertile mythology. As always, he dips from the numerically shallow but talent-deep well of Canadian actors, employing several who did fine work for Chris Haddock in such outstanding shows as DA VINCI'S INQUEST, DA VINCI'S CITY HALL, and INTELLIGENCE. And also as always, his writing and ideas are highly intellectual and philosophical, challenging our concepts of reality, morality and existence. Carter never dumbs it down, and indeed, the ideas behind HARSH REALM are so fertile that one gets the sense that this was a sandbox of almost infinite size, which could have been explored for any number of seasons with the right guidance.Unfortunately, the show suffered from the beginning from questionable casting and a confusion of focus: Bairstow is too flat to carry a TV series, Sweeny relishes his cigar-chewing role as the mercenary but doesn't quite sell it, and Max Martini, who is a very fine actor with a real gift for emotional and devil-may-care roles, seems uncomfortable playing a stolid villain. Sarah-Jane Redmond is underused, and Terry O'Quinn, a phenomenal performer, gets saddled with the heaviest dialog. The story hiccups from idea to idea, story to story, without ever establishing a clear-cut identity, and the internal logic of the Realm is not always clear. The first season of any show is always a quest to find what works and what doesn't, and HARSH REALM was casting around pretty hard, trying to discover the formula that would give audiences not only a reason to come back, but a clear understanding of what the show was really about. I'm not a fan of the idea of "high concept" television that must be defined in a single sentence, but if you're going to cast this broad of a net, it's not easy to attract viewers accustomed to easily explicable formulas (even a show as highbrow as THE X-FILES was easy to define).However, HARSH REALM has some episodes are quite good, demonstrating just how truly flexible the format of this series could be: In "Keine Ausgang," Hobbes and Pinocchio discover a simulation-within-a-simulation: a WW2 battle which repeats itself endlessly, trapping anyone who enters it a hellish version of Groundhog Day. In "Leviathan" they tangle with a bounty hunter who has the power to simply turn virtual characters off. "Reunion" sees Hobbes encounter the V.C. version of his own mother, testing his ability to distinguish that which is "real" from that which is virtual. And "Camera Obscura," which starts as a simple Romeo & Juliet tale, is actually a very interesting story about one man's ability to manipulate events within the Realm. There are a number of scenarios and situations which genre-bend science-fiction with horror and even comedy, again demonstrating the fertility of the world Carter has brought to us.In the end, HARSH REALM is a mess, but it is a fascinating mess, with an almost bottomless well of potential stories that we never got to see: only nine were shot, and only three were ever aired. Like all pregnant ideas that never got a full hearing, there's an air of tragedy to this show, but the truth is it just wasn't fully baked before it was served to the audience. I hope one day that someone, perhaps even Carter himself, can return and mine this soil for all of what it's worth. For now, however, this is what we have.

My dad was happy. He's into X-Files, Millennium etc...So this was perfect for him.

Excellente série de Chris Carter. Les personnages sont intéressants, attachants et se découvrent petit à petit au fil des épisodes, l'intrigue complexe à souhait et la musique pleine de souvenirs. Les décors sont superbes et pas un seul épisode ne m'a pas tenu en haleine : la série n'a pas eu le temps de "s'épuiser" vu que le nombre d'épisode est très limité (la série ne se termine pas mais continue sur quelques sites internet... Normal pour une histoire de monde virtuel).Un bon moment de télévision

Une série que je trouve réellement excellente , avec des scénarios vraiment bons ! Enfin une série originale qui nous éloigne de ce que l'ont a l'habitude de croiser ! Juste dommage qu'il n'y ait que si peu d'épisodes ...

Conforme à ce que j'en attendais. Sans défaut, envoi rapide. La série a pris de l'âge mais le sujet est toujours intéressant.