Klaus Silberbauer

USD 200 millions and some of the best actors in the world, and Netflix still manages to produce a messy story with more plot holes than bullet holes (and there's a lot of bullet holes), cardboard characters and hundreds of movie clichés.

Brutal, dark - yet funny.... in a gruesome way. American Psycho meets Curb Your Enthusiasm and lots and lots of blow and explicit sex scenes. In Norwegian. The acting is exceptiionally good, and the amount of research that have gone into getting everything just right - from the cars to the coffee machine - is astounding.

Typical Will Ferrell movie. Weird and uneven. But strangely loyal to both Iceland and the quaintness of the concept of The European Song Contest.

1,000 rabid baboons fighting over 2 broken typewriters would not be able to put together a script this flawed. An amazingly bad concoction of half baked ideas, stupidly bad science, weird set design and a heavy dose pseudo psychological, pseudo religious bs. What a waste of acting talent and great cgi.

Coming of age meets thriller in this pearl of a Swedish movie.

The cinematography is incredible and the way the director depicts the cold, hopeless setting of a sad Stockholm suburb is stunning.

It's a beautiful and extremely well directed movie, 100 % Scandinavian in all its darkness and in its weird mix of social realism and super-naturalism.

Image a very well made, quite slow Nordic noir blend of Donnie Darko, The Ice Storm and Bram Stokers Dracula, with a dash of The Killing. Sounds weird, but it works. I know an American remake has been made but I cannot in my wildest dream imagine it living up to this, the original.

Very impressive special effects. Great science. But unfortunately the movie fails at some crucial points. The story line feels clumsy, it starts extremely slow and never really picks up pace. The on screen "this is the future" graphics is ugly and naive and not needed at all. Same thing with the constant sci-fi ambient sound effects. It makes the movie feel very altmodisch.

The story is very straight forward and the director have tried to make it more interesting by chopping the story line up, but not in an elegant way.

Add to that the characters who seem quite shallow and that the whole plot idea is stolen from the scene in Clarke's 2010 (the book, not the movie) where the Chinese space ship lands on Europa, only to find it inhabited with some large light sensitive creatures.

FInally, the "we found some tapes" a la Blair Witch and Cloverfield is not fun anymore. The fact that almost all shots are faked surveillance cam shots makes the cinematography incredibly boring - despite the very nice zero gravity effects and beautiful space vistas.

Once again Winding Refn gives us an aesthetically pleasing movie with little depth to it. Only the great acting brings a little depth to the shallow characters. The violence is almost cartoon-ish and the plot is not the strongest. 99 % of the time, Drive holds up, but a few times, the style slips, the references don't work or the storyline over-steers a bit.

However,

contrary to most of Winding Refn's Danish movies after Pusher, Drive works. Refn's style just fits LA better than Copenhagen, I guess. This is retro in a cool way - like an action movie from the eighties (pink Miami Vice-like titles and all) retrofitted with the cynical world view of a post-911 century. Like Miami Vice meets Reservoir Dogs meets Heat with a twist of Vanishing Point... - only a bit more rough to the edges.

The excellent sound track and the movie's beautiful imagery is absolutely worth your time.

Sean Connery is great - otherwise this movie blows. In a typical Hyams way the story is too explicit and the rhythm of the film choppy, partly due to bad editing. Some scenes seem to take forever, while chunks of time disappear. Plot holes the size of a crater occur continuously. Dialogue is weak and badly directed and there's absolutely no suspense. You just know what's coming and you just really don't give a damn.

Even when Hyams near the end of the story introduces - surprise surprise - an extra bad guy (the two original bad guys were finished off too quickly, I guess) he comes from out of nowhere. I just can't fight off the feeling that the script was written as the filming went along.

The physics are badly screwed up, of course. Sound in space. 1G when people walk, 0.6 G when they jump. Sometimes 0 atm environment equals zero G and people explode when exposed to the outside environment.

This is so Hyams. His movies always have a really bad flow to them, a too simple storyline and a painfully bad dialog.

I didn't have high hopes for this one, having read the reviews. Monster movie meets Blair Witch. But it's absolutely an OK flick.

Great effects and an extremely cool apocalyptic atmosphere. Definitely worth a watch.

Hand-held camera can be tiring, yes - but in this case, and combined with the great effects, it works.

The plot itself isn't exactly news, but as it's all seen from the antagonists point of view and with no further explanation, you really get that "what would I have done"-feeling.

Yes, we need explanations, but I really like that Abrams hasn't tried to tag on an ending explaining what happened.

Great acting by Will Smith! And stunning visual effects and some great chocks. I loved the post apocalyptic feeling of it, although it's not as dark and disturbing as 28 Days Later...

***SPOILERS BELOW*** BUT ... Somehow it seems cut down and partly spoiled by the Hollywood producers. Why do they have to make these stupid "there is hope" endings? This movie should has ended in the basement. The ending reminds me of the catastrophic ending of Blade Runner 1982 - it seems tagged on and extremely corny with the church, the flag and all.

Please leave us frightened and a bit puzzled instead. With that creepy story no one believes a fairy tale ending anyway.

The movie is also very short (1½ hours!), and a lot is left unexplained. I think the producers and the editor went bananas with the scissors trying to make this movie go down well with the American audience. Please do a longer, darker "European" version for the rest of us.

A Director's Cut is definitely needed!

But go see it. The effects and the beautiful shots of a deserted NY are worth it on their own.

Why is this joke of a director still allowed to make movies? With this stupid, poorly made B movie he hits rock bottom. Hard.

"Capricorn One", "2010", "Sudden Death", "Timecop", "End of Days", and now this! It's really amazing that's it's possible to have such a track record and still be able to raise funds for the next piece of garbage. One should think that the producers would have smelled the rat by now, but no: Some schmuck unleashed Hyams on yet another sci fi classic: Ray Bradbury's shot story "A Sound of Thunder".

Everything about this movie is bad. The dialog is lame, the storyline messed up. But the effects are even lamer than the other lame stuff. Example: When the actors walk around in the streets the computer graphics behind them look like something I did on my Amiga 10 years ago. They are so obviously walking on a tread mill in front of a screen.

Hyams: Please quit. Find a day job and stop this nonsense. You should've realized after making the miserable failure of "Capricorn One" that this movie business is for professionals.

Yet another DC Comic made into a movie. And the worst adaptation so far. So lame.

Imagine a cross over between "Inspector Barnaby", "Phantom of the Opera" and "1984" with a shallow and messy story line that just leaves you cold.

Hugo Weaving is a great actor, but even he cannot reach out to the audience from behind a stupid plastic mask. The characters all remain shallow and utterly uninteresting.

Why the lesbian love story? Why does this V guy turn into a top tuned ninja soldier from the virus? Why does the villain have to look like Hitler (yeah, we've got it. He's the bad guy - but come on...)? Why does the officer guess that a train will be used to bomb the parliament? Why do they ride around in 2003 Jaguars in 2026? Why doesn't Dell improve on their LCD flat panels in the next 20 years?

A lot of the people commenting on this movie obviously felt quite revolutionary for a moment. "Yeah,let's go fight... something!" One guy even suggests that "V for Vendetta" might be banned for glorifying terrorism. Oh come on, man! They'll ban "Monsters Inc." before that!

This is not an "important" movie. It's just a piece of pseudo-intellectual nonsense that makes stupid people think they've watched something really thought provoking. A reeaaal subtle comment upon the war on terrorism. Yeah right - subtle as a runaway freight train...

Another comment said that this movie is real science fiction, and that's true. It captures the spirit of the early modern science fiction from the fifties and sixties.

The production design is stunning and the acting very good. Nice sci-fi movie - go see it.

I would be pleased if Hyams would stick to lame action flicks with Van Damme or Arnold Schwartzenegger and leave classics like 2010 to someone else. He is way out of league. That said, 2010 is much better than total catastrophes like Capricorn One or End Of Days.

With 2010 he manages to pull off a descent main stream movie without any catastrophic blunders, except for his always bad timing and rhythm and some half hearted zero gravity effects. But it isn't as good at it should have been, considering the novel.

Next year Hyams is coming up with yet another sci-fi movie build upon a literary classic: A Sound Of Thunder, a great novel by Ray Bradbury. Wonder if that too will suffer from Hyam's Hollywoodism?

Regression in an orderly fashion :)

Not THAT kinky, but kinky enough too make most US right wing Christians pretty worked up, I guess.

Well, I can see why some people don't like this flick. It's slow, the characters are pretty shallow. But somehow I feel that the slow pace and the "Lynchy" feel makes Crash somewhat special. (Don't get me wrong - Cronenberg is not Lynch).

Why are car crashes so exciting? Why was half the world so intrigued by Lady Diana's bloody death inside a wrecked Mercedes? It's that dark side of the mind that J. G. Ballard explores in Crash.

Ballard is messing around with all the forbidden stuff - rubbing our nose in it. Scar tissue, car wrecks, death and pretty graphic sex, all wrapped up in some very stylish photography.

The characters eagerness to relive the trauma of the car crash and the, admittedly, sick - but nevertheless exciting - mixture of sex and death is quite effective. These people SHOULD be in grief, fighting to get back to a normal life, but instead they return to that strange moment of fright and sexual arousal, in the second before the cars smash into each other.

The movie doesn't try to explain anything - it just tells the story. No morale and no Hollywood.

I had a good laugh watching Capricorn One. The general idea is good: A movie about the biggest scam of them all - a fake Mars journey. But the movie is so amateurish made that it hurts. Even the cutting is poorly done - the movie simply falls apart.

The first 15 minutes rocks. A genuine no-nonsense rocket launch, NASA style, using actual footage. Very promising. And from then on it disintegrates.

The dialogue changes from long (long long), boring monologues to stupid, slap stick dialogue, using every cliche in the book.

The plot itself could have been good, the general idea is interesting, but the story line has gaping holes. What about this: You perform the greatest scam of mankind - only three men know the truth. Do you guard them? No - you lock them up in a room and go away. And so of course they escape - simply by removing the door from it's frame .... please.

The life support systems turn up to be defective... 3 weeks before launch!? Oh come on!

• "Yes, now we are ready to go to Mars, we only need the life support system"

• "Oh that? It will be ready 3 weeks before launch - then we test it" ...

The choppers send out to find the astronauts fly together instead of splitting up. There is no soldiers or anti terrorist guys in the choppers - the pilots themselves run out wearing flight helmets and a hand gun, trying to shoot the fugitives :-)

Notice the center screen in the control room - even when the space ship has reached Mars it's still showing an Earth orbit...

And so on... one blunder after the other.

The timing is strange too - small, non-important scenes seem to take forever (e.g. the "I'm telling a joke while I climb a mountain scene".) While important parts of the story disappear in a blur. For how long are the astronauts walking in the desert? 2 hours? 2 days? Hard to tell.

Other reviewers tend to say that I'm not a true sci-fi fan because I tend to rate sci-fi movies badly. Believe you me: I'm a huge sci-fi fan. I've seen most of it, and I have read most of it. That's why I get so disappointed when it's poorly done. And, let's face it, there is lot of bad sci-fi out there.

So... watch this, by all means. It's a laugh - not just because it's bad sci-fi, but because it's a bad movie, breaking every rule in the book. This should have been a B TV-show, not a movie.

Bad writing, bad directing, bad bad effects and, oh my god: Bad bad acting!

1/10.

Excellent movie that asks the question many Europeans ask: Why are the Americans so afraid? You have the richest, mightiest, most powerful nation on this planet. You have enough firepower to eradicate all life 12 times. You have enough money to buy several countries each year. Still, you may be the most frightened people on Earth. You build larger and larger prisons, use more and more on defense and you own about 250 million guns(!) Why so afraid? It can't be just because of the 9-11 tragedy.

Moore points out that the real problems aren't Marilyn Manson, violent movies or South Park. The problem is the way that poor Americans have to work 70 hours a week without earning enough money to pay the rent, while the rich Americans only get richer and still more afraid of the rising number of poor people. That most of the American media discourse is about violence and shooting. That the Bush government is using the fear to earn money for his friends. And that hand guns are everywhere.

With Bowling For Columbine Moore urges the US to stop the paranoia, stop shooting each other, put away the gun and maybe have a look on how they are doing things in Canada or in most of the rest of the world.

This movie was made for one single purpose: To stage as many stunts as possible. The plot is brain dead and the morale juvenile and pretty terrifying.

The violence has no purpose at all but to give the stunt team a chance to show off. Not that the stunts are that great by international standards - they seem to be much like the "wow - look at all those bloody exit wounds"-stunts the same Spang-Olsen brothers staged for Danish TV-series during the eighties. Just bigger and more expensive this time.

The story line sucks.... big time. It's like the stunt team made a list of the stuff they wanted to make, and then the author made the plot fit this wish list. The plot is so stupid and noncoherent that you've got to laugh. The writer, Anders Thomas Jensen, tries to make it all come together in one of these Tarantino "it's all coming together´in the end'-endings and fails terribly.

The racist jokes just aren't funny - only stupid - and the violence is acted out way too cynically. The way the lead characters brutally guns down every one around them is absolutely without any irony. These facts makes the movie more a fascist statement than the funny action comedy it might have been supposed to be.

I give it 3/10: 1 for the stunts (well, OK for Danish standards), 1 for Nicolai Lie Kaas and 1 for Thomas Willum Jensen who are both splendid actors. What the h... are those guys doing in this movie?

Much better movie than I anticipated. The CG is .... fantastic. Stunning. Go see it if you have even the remotest interest in 3D modeling.

The plot is like that of a Japanese cartoon: Extremely romantic and superficial - but nevertheless quite effective.

Let's hope that Square the next time will use the incredible possibilities of their CG talents for a deeper and more interesting story line.

You know "Mission to Mars"? This is worse! Apart from the nice graphics this movie pretty much sucks. The storyline is so ludicrous and Hollywood-like that it's a farce. With its lame action and plastic characters, "Red Planet" fails on the same points as "Armageddon", but isn't as fun. And Val Kilmer just ain't Bruce Willis.

It's a shame that the big Hollywood budgets aren't spent on proper science fiction instead of low end space action like this.

I was really looking forward to watching a worthy sequel to 2001... oh boy. The plot is incredibly far fetched and the end a terrible rip off from 2001 Space Odyssey. The only touching scene is when Robbins commits suicide, floating in front of Mars. Nice shock-effect and very romantic indeed. But that's the only memorable moment of this failed attempt to make an epic scifi movie. I rated MtM 3 - 1 point for the suicide, 1 for the modeling of the space ship and finally 1 point for the attempt to make a real old-fashioned science fiction movie.

After having read the novel, I was thrilled to learn that Dune had been made into a movie. Too bad the movie was such a bummer. Herbert's fabulous novel is just not right for David Lynch's introverted way of film making. I've found out that before Lynch decided to make his grandiose disaster, Jodorowsky, Moebius and Chris Foss was underway with a beautiful concept of Dune. Unfortunately they didn't make it and we were left with Lynch's mainstream weirdness. Lynch's Dune is not a venture into the future and into another world, as it is a venture into Lynch's ego. Eraserhead, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks: that's Lynch. Dune: that really should've been someone else.