Featured TV on DVD Review: Looking for Alaska
April 28, 2020
Looking for Alaska - Buy from Amazon: DVD
Looking for Alaska is a TV mini-series based on the book by John Green. The film was originally going to be adapted into a movie, but a troubled production resulted in that plan being scrapped before pivoting to television. Was this a wise move?
After a short prologue of the future, we flash back to 2005 Orlando where we first meet Miles Halter. He’s a high school student who is transferring to a private school in Alabama. His mother tries to throw him a going away party, but no one shows up. He’s not surprised by this. This is not the reason he’s leaving public school, at least not the only reason. He’s leaving to find his, “Great Perhaps”, a term used by the French writer François Rabelais in his final words. Miles is obsessed with final words. While his parents are driving him to his new boarding school, we get to meet some of the other students, including Alaska Young and her roommate Marya. When he gets to school, we meet Chip, who goes by the nickname The Colonel. The Colonel immediately nicknames Miles “Pudge”. The Colonel quickly introduces Miles to Takumi and then to Alaska. For Miles, it is love at first sight. For Alaska, well, she barely notices him at first.
There’s a big commotion that night when Marya is caught by the Dean with her boyfriend smoking pot and making out. They are immediately kicked out, but the boyfriend was part of the Weekend Warriors, the rich kids who are rich enough to go home every weekend. They already didn’t like The Colonel, Alaska, and Takumi and they blame them for their friend being expelled. This causes an escalating prank war between the two sides with Miles forced to take a side. The first day of classes, the group meet Lara, a Romanian student. There might be a spark between her and Miles, but Miles’ obsession with Alaska puts any relationship with her on shaky ground.
Looking for Alaska’s Tomatometer Score is currently 92% positive. Not only that, but its average review score is over 8.5 out of 10, so of the vast majority of critics who gave the film a positive review, the vast majority of those positive reviews were very enthusiastic. I’m not in that camp. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the mini-series, but I didn’t love it. A lot of the positive reviews compared the show to teenage soap operas of the recent past, shows like The O.C. or Dawson’s Creek. … I hate shows like that. I avoided the melodrama of high school when I was in high school, I certainly don’t want to spend my free time watching such shows. Fortunately, Looking for Alaska does rise above the standard genre offerings in a number of ways.
Firstly, the writing is just better than most similar shows and deals with topics in a more mature way. Class and race divide is a big part of the story and that does elevate the mini-series. The show also deals with difficult subjects like childhood trauma and unexpected death in a way that is heartbreaking without being exploitative. Looking for Alaska is also helped by an impressive young cast, especially Kristine Froseth, who plays Alaska Young. She’s the most difficult character to bring to life, as she could have easily been little more than a trope, but that isn’t the case here. I’ve also heard a lot of people praise the show for generating a sense of nostalgia for 2005. I don’t know if this is true, but just the concept of being nostalgic for 2005 makes me feel so very old.
There are 18 deleted scenes from six of the eight episodes. There are also two featurettes on disc three, the first being Finding Your Tribe, a ten-minute interview featurette where the cast talk about what drew them to the story. In Search of a Great Perhaps is a 14-minute making of featurette. This isn’t a lot of extras. I would have loved an audio commentary track or two, but it is enough.
I am clearly not in the target audience for Looking for Alaska, but even I can recognize its quality. Fans of teenage melodramas will certainly get sucked into the story and these characters. The DVD doesn’t have a lot of extras, but it is worth picking up.
Video on Demand
The Show
Review
The Extras
The Verdict
Filed under: Video Review, Sofia Vassilieva, John Green, Timothy Simons, Charlie Plummer, Kristine Froseth, Meg Wright, Denny Love