Dakota Fanning is a space alien. Well, she's not all space alien, but she's part alien.

The real question for some may be whether I am talking about the real Dakota Fanning or the Dakota Fanning that appears in the Steven Spielberg produced miniseries Taken. In truth, it doesn't matter. She, along with a perfectly sinister performance by Joel Gretsch (who plays himself as a young military man, an aging, retired father, and all the years in between), steal the show..

But is it a show worth stealing? By and large, it is.

Some have said the nearly 15-hour miniseries is Close Encounters Of The Third Kind meets The X-Files. That's not far off the mark. Very early on, elements of both are up front and center, with aliens and conspiracies and bad military men and ambiguous alien visitors.

Featuring solid television production, good scripts, passable special effects and fantastic performances by a huge cast, Taken chronicles 50 years of alien abduction and government conspiracies, all circling around three families. The whole saga begins during World War II. We witness a bomber go down with its crew. Miraculously, all survive. But what follows is more terrifying than the crash. One by one, the crew begins to die. Crew member Russell Keys (Steve Burton) is plagued by nightmares of the crash, and when he learns his fellow crewmen are dying, is plagued by much more.

Meanwhile, Sally Clarke (Catherine Dent) is unhappily married with kids, a lonely woman on a farm. When she gets a strange visitor, things change for her. But that visit sets into motion of a chain of events that will take 50 years to culminate.

Finally, Captain Owen Crawford (played brilliantly by Gretsch) discovers that he has the perfect means by which to ascend to power in the military. He gets involved in the crash of an object outside of Roswell, New Mexico. The crash consumes him and drives him, his story interjecting with that of Keys and Clarke.

What follows are three stories of three generations, each interwoven, all concerning alien abduction and the government's role in alien visitation. Fans of Spielberg's view on extra terrestrials and the X-Files' view on government secrecy and paranoia will feel right at home here.

All ten episodes, each 90 minutes long, tie together to form one long narrative, though many of the episodes can serve well as standalone entertainment. It is the characters that keep the whole affair afloat, with family the tie that binds the three generations together. Some of the middle episodes are slow, and the later installments rely too heavily on cliffhangers, but all in all viewers are likely to keep watching well past bedtime. (Despite being 15 hours long, I watched the whole series in just three days).

So do we get a dark view or light view of aliens? A bit of both, actually. We have dread and we have wonder. They are scary and they are wonderful. Questions of the aliens' intent linger right up until the end. Yes, many questions are answered for those who watch all 15 hours, but others are left open, a must for a tale like this. I never felt gypped at being left with too many open threads, nor did I ever feel as if too much was explained.

But despite being about aliens, the main focus of Taken isn't aliens. It's people. And that's where the cast comes in.

The cast turns in superb performances throughout, with only a few exceptions. The casting was perfect here; almost all of the characters live and breathe, with understandable motivations and believable struggles. What really the multi-generational angle shine is the fantastic makeup work. The characters age as the series moves forward, allowing us to see people live out 30-plus years of their life in a convincing fashion. Again, Gretsch especially nails this. Very engaging.

The shining star of this cast is a pipsqueak everybody knows by now, but who at the time (2002) was something of an unknown. Dakota Fanning steals the show, simply owning every scene she is in. She plays a young girl who is unexplainably wise and knowing beyond her years, and she does so perfectly, with eyes that look old and full of knowledge and understanding we could never grasp, as if she is seeing something you aren't. It's rare when a child actor can pull off wisdom, but she does.

Take note that this is not Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking. The production values are not nearly on par with those of, say, Band of Brothers. What this is, is a well-produced TV miniseries, not a big-budget film. The pacing is television pacing, not movie pacing (deliberate, not action-oriented), and little in the way of violence, language or nudity is shown that could not be shown on network television. None of this works against the series, however. It’s a well-realized series that stands up well against other alien abduction stores.

Yeah, Aliens, Whatever. How's The Quality?
First, the picture quality. Good? Yeah. It’s not reference material, but then this series was made for TV. While nothing blew me away, nothing stood out as overtly wrong in my viewing. You won’t complain. The same holds true for sound, too. The Dolby 5.1 encoding is pretty nice, but not off the charts; just good enough. No raves, no complaints.

The sixth disc of this set contains nothing but bonus material, but I’ve got to tell you, for a full disc of bonus material this was disappointing. What you get are a series of featurettes that cover various aspects of making the series – but never very well, and never in a very interesting way. It’s a glossy bunch of hype disguised as documentary that will do very little to give you insight on how the series was created, the kind of empty garbage you expect to see on Inside Hollywood. Better than nothing, but also damn near useless.

The Bottom Line
So is Taken worth the steep price tag? That's a tough question to answer. For lovers of the alien abduction genre, probably. You'll love the first viewing, and you'll watch it more than once. It’s not as dark as X-Files nor as light as Close Encounters, existing in its own in-between world, but it covers all the bases. For casual fans of the genre, a rental might be a good idea before taking the big plunge. Those looking for pure sci-fi, too, should proceed with caution; a special effects extravaganza this isn't. But overall, a very worthy watch.