Re-imaginings are always interesting to me. I love public domain material, and seeing how people take those original ideas and change them around. With that in mind, I have been really looking forward to Sci-Fi’s “Tin Man”. I’m a sucker for a re-imagining of “The Wizard of Oz”…and I’m not one of those people that think these things sully the original. So, I had high hopes for this new mini-series. Having said that, I didn’t find the first part of this mini-series to be very satisfying.

There are some good and interesting ideas in “Tin Man”, but they aren’t really executed very well. The dialogue, for example, feels like a Firefly fan script. The writer’s seem to have been channeling just about every poorly written sci-fi novel you’ve ever read, and funneled that through a “Firefly” filter. The results are typically unnatural sounding – and only a few of the actors in the mini-series are talented enough to make it work. Plus every time I had to hear the odd an unnecessary abbreviations like “D.G” and “The O.Z.” I cringed.

The primary cast (D.G., Glitch, Tin Man) are fine actors that do a good enough job, but the smaller roles in the film (which take up a significant amount of screen time) are really terrible. D.G.’s parents, the Longcoats and The Sorceress all over act like Frank Langella in “Masters of the Universe”.

The musical score also feels like it was ripped directly from Stargate, and it has a very “I’ve heard this before” feel to it -but in in a particularly good way. The special effects, on the other hand, while not perfect (an obviously basic cable budgeted) are effective and better than most of the projects that the Sci-Fi Channel finance.

The story, of course, is vaguely familiar to anyone who’s ever read “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” or seen the original movie. All of the roles have been slightly altered, with the “Tin Man” now being a sheriff, the Cowardly Lion being some sort of Teen Wolf looking “seer” and so on. As the mini-series progresses, however, they do flesh out this universe to make it distinctly there own, and not just a retelling of Frank L. Baum’s classic.

When the first part of the mini-series ended, I must admit some of thing things introduced in the last 20 minutes or so are interesting, and I’ll be coming back to review part 2, but I’m not terribly excited about where this is going.

Grade: C