Has anyone else seen this??  I feel so bad for Rosario Dawson for having starred in Gemini Division.  That’s so mean, isn’t it?…Yeah, it really is but this thing is also just really bad, really poorly done.  This actually reminds me a lot of a webseries I was on back in the early 00s – we were out shooting with handhelds in an old drive in and relied mostly on CGI…this thing has the same effect.  They had more money though than we.

I stumbled across this bad, bad boy on Netflix and I dig Rosario (seriously girl, I think you’re pretty amazeballs so please don’t take the whole “why the fuck did you do this thing??” too personally!!) and it said it was a television show and looked intriguing so I went, “Yay!”.  40 minutes later I paused to take a break and went, “Oh my gosh, are you freaking kidding me???  I have a whole other hour to get through??  Dammit.”  Yeah…Googled it after and it seems this wasn’t a television show but a web series done in 2008, or sort of a web series anyway.  According to Wiki, this was originally done in 5 to 7 minute long episodes that aired on NBC.com as well as being shown to some cable subscribers on their t.v. via On Demand.  Knowing it’s a web series makes it a little less forgivable but still.  Just still.

Hi, I’m Rosario and I’m smokin’ hot.

Okay, so Rosario plays this chick, Anna Diaz, who used to be a cop.  Then she meets this too good to be true dude named Nick, who well, really was too good to be true because he was a SiM (which is exactly what you think it is – a simulated life form).  Robot Boy (is that politically correct to call him Robot Boy??  Cause I’m gonna) is a military deserter (cause that’s why SiM’s were created to just go be soldiers to keep down the whole people dying thing) along with the rest of his SiM company.  For whatever reason, this particular troop’s thingamajigs malfunctioned and now they’re all “We wanna be human and live!!!”.  Unfortch for them they all have expiration dates and eventually we find out that Robot Boy is trying to artificially inseminate the love of his life, Anna, whom I think he met like three weeks earlier.  But it’s like totes romantical that he’s doing this without her knowledge – knocking her up with something that’s never been seen before and nobody has any idea what will happen – because he thinks she’s bee-ay-yoo-tiful.  Obvis, that makes robot/alien/human baby making FINE.  MEN, I swear.  *sighs*

Anywho, Nick gets killed right after he proposes to Anna and then Anna gets picked up by these people called Gemini Division who’s a group that hunts down SiMs, I guess, and then she starts working for them so she can get all the secrets and the rest of the thing is her calling a “friend”, i.e. the viewer, on some phone link thing and having conversations with the occasional flashback thrown in for explanation.

Not even staring at this for an hour and a half can save this thing…

The main issue here, minus the inane plot, is that 95% of this is green screened and the CGI is soooo bad.  So bad.  So cheesy.  Anna and some wack dude she picks up in Mexico City have some sort of weapons that shoot circular laser beams and it’s like watching Tom & Jerry all over again.  Oy.  SO not good.  The entire series is simply the link conversations which can work as a format in small doses.  Sometimes we need exposition, people!  Seriously.  And the plot??  Okay, SiMs and Gemini.  Check.  Anna.  Check.  Then a whole bunch of freaking random people thrown in, including a 19 year old former junkie who’s also a genius heiress, that just ends with a convoluted…convolution?  Oh, you know what I’m trying to say right?  I got the distinct impression that by about halfway through this, Rosario herself was wondering why she’d agreed to this.  I could almost just feel the waves of embarrassment rolling off her.  Poor thing, you just wanna give her a hug.

I dunno, I’m sure this is a cult classic for some people out there and I know better than most the limitations of doing a web series.  I just think that if you have money and sponsorships, your product should look better than something I made with no money and sponsorships when I was 24.  Just sayin’.