MossMan

I'm not sure why it gets so much hate in these reviews. In my opinion they have faithfully recreated the games from the drama series to surprising effect and the tension between the players is closer to the drama than I would expect as well.

My only minor complaint (watched up to the penultimate episode) is that they leaned too much on the backstabbing nominate-my-enemy type games for the later episodes - I would have preferred mostly chance/skill/strategy games with just a couple of nasty backstabbers thrown in... It would have had more impact when it happened, that way - instead it did feel a bit too reality-show towards the end.

Looking forward to the finale!

What I liked about the premise and the first two seasons was when nice little "what-if" ideas were teased out and developed. As a fan of sci-fi realism and world-building - and as an aerospace engineer - I tried to overlook some of the more annoying soap-opera and personal-drama aspects and concentrate on how the real events, personalities, tech and concepts I knew about were being woven into an interesting story.

This first episode of season three started out a little clumsy and muddled but I kept my hopes up that the slightly awkward character re-introduction and exposition was just necessary to get the ball rolling. Unfortunately though, things took a turn for the disaster-movie worse instead. Without going into spoilers, I will just mention that every tired and predictable trope was ticked off - countdown of doom, swelling of music, heroing of heroes, trashing of engineering realities... so instead of being excited I was bored out of my mind and heading to the IMDb reviews page instead.

I remember rolling my eyes during the season two opener as well, and things certainly improved following that one, so I just hope the "drama" is dialled back a bit in subsequent episodes of this season too.

Addendum: I'm now watching season 4 and in my opinion they have un-jumped the shark in a big way! I'm happy to say I am enjoying the genuinely intriguing stories and - despite the season opener again having an "action movie" bent - so far there has been no eye rolling silliness or soap-level drama. Phew!

I had an unusual reason to sit through this... a long time ago, my wife downloaded this (when torrents were a thing) but we never got round to watching it. As it had languished on a corner of the PC's disk, I felt compelled to watch the whole thing before deleting it, out of respect for the bits it had occupied for nearly a decade.

After literally five minutes of thinking "is this a joke or did someone really just go through what felt like every moody French cinema trope in all seriousness?" I turned to IMDb on my phone (letting it run on in the background) and see the reviews confirmed my worst fears.

After the opening French bit, it becomes just an eeeeeennnndlessss run of sunset, fields, empty room interior, street, sunset, crappy row of new-build houses, buffalo, fields, motel pool, sunset, church, empty room interior, angry people in car, sunset, fields, supermarket, sunset, horses, crappy row of new-build houses, sunset, fields, trees, sunset, etc. Etc. And on and on and on. All with constant moving camera, constant moving people (lots of pointless twirling, as many have mentioned), accompanied with constant rising-and-falling strings or horns and mumbled, half-unintelligible, stilted, nonsense dialogue.

And then an airport, some more sunsets and it's suddenly - finally - over.

I couldn't give a rat's behind about the characters as they were just boring, self-centred, empty vessels, devoid of anything to sympathise with or care about in any way - apart from the daughter, the only one with a personality... and even she wanted to get away from all this! Ha ha!

All in all it just felt like they picked a few locations, waited for sunset, shot a couple of hours each time of everyone walking away from the camera and around each other while looking moody, then afterwards spent a week or two cutting it all up in the editing suite and dubbing some whispered crappy lines from a random fanfic website. And... that's it.

I persevered through the entire first episode, hoping that the "drama" would get better or (preferably) just go away, but alas that was not to be.

Five minutes into episode two I simply couldn't take it any more and started to hit fast forward through any scripted bits. Luckily, it turns out that the weird mix of documentary and (really) bad sci-fi follows a regular pattern, so I learnt to skip to the next documentary section without having to endure any more of the ridiculous plot, terrible pacing or bad acting that had ruined the first episode for me.

My advice would be to wait for someone to upload a "Mars - the 2016- bits" edit somewhere and watch that instead.

Here's a movie that is a cliché from start to finish.

The first hour tells a very simple and predictable old story (you could sum it up in a couple of sentences) and doesn't even bother to embellish the basic premise with any subplot or details. Instead it fills time with interminably long "smouldering" looks (sorry, this was not good acting as some claim, it was first-grade ham) and people running around the over-the-top set swishing their over-the-top costumes about or showing off their cleavage.

Then the second half changes tack completely and turns the whole thing into "how many thousands of people can we get to run/jump/fly at each other while swishing various weapons around?". Utterly silly assassins flying around all over the place, squealing... it's truly like a *parody* of a Chinese historical action movie! Which wouldn't be so bad except it takes itself far too seriously! It's so obvious they were trying to "make an epic". Enough with the rainbow-coloured costumes and interiors, which don't look at all classy or beautiful. Stop labouring the fact that the good army are on the gold and yellow side and the bad army are all black and gunmetal. I got it already, it's not clever.

It's a silly, simple story done about as tediously as possible.

This was a weird film. Weird because on the one hand it's so hopelessly and shamelessly simplistic and moralistic, yet on the other hand, when it's presumably supposed to be showing us why one should turn to religion as an answer to one's problems, it shows Christianity in such a farcical manner that if I turned on halfway through I would genuinely think it was lampooning the very type of film it's trying to be! Maybe it's because I'm atheist, but the stereotypical Christian characters and acts of God were hilarious! Not to mention the oh-so-predictable fall-from-grace of the "sinners".

Well anyway, I found it quite funny - but not enough to make it so-bad-it's-good.

This movie had some potential, some nice ideas, nice cinematography and some nice moments, but they were all thrown together and scenes then basically pulled out of a hat.

The music was quite nice, on the whole, but you get a bit tired of hearing the opening riff of something and thinking "okay, here comes the next 'Wonder Years' moment...".

The leading character lacks motivation for practically every action and emotion. Whether it's Bloom's acting, poor direction or after-the-fact editing I'm not sure. Too often I felt "huh? wasn't he supposed to be depressed / happy / relaxed / pent-up just now?" as the movie throws us off in another direction. I expect this was supposed to add some changes of pace and humour, but it just felt out-of-character to me.

And then the female lead. Sorry - she's supposed to be endearing and charming, with her quirky little take on life and unpredictable spontaneity... but she was just plain annoying! I genuinely would have steered well clear of that woman and told her to leave me the hell alone on so many occasions - especially their first meeting.

And finally there are several supposedly funny scenes that simply weren't funny. Characters burst out laughing - for several minutes - but I just felt uncomfortable since I had that nagging doubt you feel when you don't get the joke. "Was it me or was that not very funny?!" Sorry, on reflection I think they just weren't, in fact, funny.

I liked this movie. It had interesting characters, an interesting story, a low level of over-the-top twists/explosions/impossibilities and it was shot with quite a high level of realism (lighting, settings, extras...) but.

Why did they have to make it so unclear? Sometimes it was simply impossible to see what was going on through a mixture of darkness, extreme close-ups and fast-editing. Good grief, I'm only 35... are my eyes *that bad* already? Not only my eyes - my hearing must be going too. I had to *concentrate* to understand the dialogue throughout the entire thing! Not one person spoke without mumbling... and of course Eddie's speech has already been discussed enough here. My take: he's supposed to be annoying, but it was just too much.

So for me this movie was pretty good, a little clearer sound & vision would have made it very good.

I wrote a scathing review of Shark's Tale a while back, and since I've not heard great things about Madagascar either I can only conclude that this movie confirms my suspicions: Dreamworks and Fox don't know what they're doing in the story or character departments.

I can not deny the technical achievements for the animation - I'm sure the studio was wetting itself with excitement at some of the fluid and particle dynamics we witness in this one - but a movie should have an original story... and this one just doesn't! It's a brain-deadening revisit to the preaching, simplistic, moralistic "inspirational" tales I hated even when I was a kid myself. It uses every cliché in the book: hard-up young kid has a dream, goes to the big city, gets knocked down by evil rich guy, loses hope, friends inspire hope, guy rouses crowd, evil guy exposed, etc. etc. etc.

No spoiler warning here, since there is nothing to spoil - you have seen variations on this cheesy theme a hundred thousand times already. As with Shark's Tale and Shrek 2 there is nothing original in here to keep me the slightest bit interested! Added to the unoriginality are the jarring and un-funny "funny" bits, which mostly consist of things getting damaged in ballistic manner... complete with rapid shouting, explosive sound effects and "funny" music. Don't get me wrong, I managed to smile once or twice, but most of the time I was just feeling numb to it.

Cases in point: what is funny about a fight being interrupted by a two-second Britney Spears impersonation?!? If there a *reason* for it to happen (or it happens when it *shouldn't*) then it could be amusing, but this just made me think "why? so what?". Another one is a robot saying "the Force is strong in this one" for no apparent reason... they build it up in its own short scene, and my reaction is... "was that it?".

Randomly throwing in pop-culture references doesn't make any sense when they have nothing to do with anything! An unexpected in-character or out-of-character phrase or action can be funny. Sudden changes in events or plot revelation can be funny. On the other hand, someone turning on a light-switch and saying "make it so" is not. If it's important that the light is switched on, there's been a nice build-up in the dramatic tension, and "make it so" is unexpected given the situation or the character saying it (or is some clever reference to Star Trek that fits the moment)... then that's a different matter.

I may have made that one up, but it's at the level I'm talking about here.

So, add to that the rather unattractive robot designs, generally uninteresting characters and dialogue drowned out by music and sound effects - it's pretty poor. Saved only by the good animation.

I am a little surprised to read the current user comment for the movie's main page that claims this was "plot by numbers".

To my mind, knowing the original book and the 1970s musical adaptation (we'll gloss over the B-movie version) this movie captured a lot of the real feelings of desolation and hopelessness that the original instilled.

Unlike in so many movies, this guy is scared and desperate! Unlike in so many movies, it doesn't look like the good guys will win...

Despite what you might expect at the beginning, the main characters don't try and play the hero... they try to run away and stay alive. That's all they can do, and that's what this movie is about. It's an altogether more sympathetic and realistic portrayal of the end of the world than we are used to seeing these days.

Regarding differences from the book: I don't quite understand the length of time that planning is supposed to have taken (I've been thinking about this a lot but the logic escapes me) and the very final scene was disappointing. I won't say more since I want this review to be spoiler-free.

But certainly a great movie, refreshingly different in story and feel.

I heard the radio series when I was a kid.

I watched the TV series first time around and thought it was utterly new and exciting.

I collected the original trilogy as soon as they came out in paperback... brilliant.

Then the fourth and fifth parts came - okay, but not the genius we'd seen previously.

Then the new radio series came along... like books 4 & 5; I had to listen religiously, even though they weren't great like they used to be.

And finally news of the movie going into production at last.

Now, since H2G2 hasn't been "fantastic" since the early eighties, I was worried... very worried. Given the tendency for movies to screw up books' stories, I was even more worried - so I spent a lot of effort following its progress and trying to convince myself it could be pretty good. Then I read the early reviews on IMDb and told myself that while some people said it wasn't so good, a lot of others thought it was well worth it.

And then it came to that fateful night when my girlfriend's sister called and asked us which movie we'd like to see together... and I suggested Hitchhiker's - but they could watch anything else if they wanted.

Hitchhiker's it was...

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. They're still mocking me for it. To put it bluntly, it's bad. Very bad. Under the circumstances of that evening, it was personally-embarrassing bad.

It's taken a month for me to get up the courage to write this, but here's what I can remember...

It opens with a musical number which seems totally out of place (and isn't very good).

It has no flow whatsoever, either in terms of story or editing. Things happen, you don't know why. Suddenly something else happens, but you don't know why. I was either lucky or cursed to know what should have been explained the whole time... goodness knows what the girls made of it.

The dialogue is terrible - either the result of poor acting, poor screenplay or poor editing. I don't know which, but I do know that there was a lot of incoherent mumbling or shouting throughout.

The characters had no character. I loved each and every one of them from the radio series' and books, but here they are flat, boring and sometimes just annoying (Trillian and Zaphod). Marvin ("he was cute" said the future sister in law!) had a tiny spark of the original, but only has about five lines in the whole movie. Strange, I used to think he was the most outstanding character in the entire oeuvre!.

On a plus point, the visual effects were nice - although I have to say I liked the book sequences in the TV series a lot more.

(Minor spoiler in this paragraph.) The messing with the story didn't improve things at all. The missing bits left gaping holes and the re-writing turned it all into a Hollywood "running from the bad guys" cliché... which it never was!!! The added bits were pointless and not very funny. Which brings us to the real problem...

This film is not funny. Where before there was great wit, there is now tame slapstick (you've watched the "funniest" bits already if you've seen the trailer!). What were once huge, convoluted, intelligent jokes are now rushed, throwaway links to the next scene. The weird little twists and concepts that put a smile on your face seem to have taken the day off. Most of the punchlines and proper delivery seemed to be missing. It makes you wonder if the makers actually understood the humour in the first place!.

And quirky humour was basically the point of Hitchhiker's, was it not?

I'll keep it short...

Technically very good and some secondary characters were quite interesting, but the story was boring pulp rubbish and the main character is plain stupid and annoying.

We're supposed to root for a guy that I would rather kick in the pants.

It's a shame that such good talent was wasted on the kind of "smart-ass tries to make it big, sees the error of his ways, saves the day, everyone hugs" story I hoped we'd finally seen the end of once the Shreks and Toy Stories started getting made!

Shame...

Jon is a lovable schmuk with a crappy life, not a faceless "nice guy" who seems to have a good house, car and presumably job.

Nermal is a terminally cute yet astute grey kitten, not some idiot Siamese neighbour.

Arlene is the gawky, gap-toothed girlfriend, not a grey bitchy neighbour.

Garfield's bed, as ANYONE who has read the comics should know, is a box with a plain blanket in it, not some kind of cutesy, oak, mini-human-bed affair.

Garfield is a lazy, witty smart-arse, not an annoying, dancing(?!?!?!?) loud-mouth who just never shuts up.

Garfield stories are existential little comments on life, how it sucks for Jon, how stupid Odie is and how wonderful lasagna and sleep are, not extremely, extremely lame, generic, feel-good, I-hate-you-but-now-I'm-going-to-rescue-you rubbish. (I stopped the movie at 25 minutes and correctly predicted exactly everything that was going to happen from then on.)

In short, apart from having a large orange cat in it (well animated though he is) - this has nothing whatsoever to do with Garfield. Did the makers actually read ANY of the comics?

I rarely choose to submit a review on IMDb these days, but I want to warn people about this film!

A friend of mine hired this saying "it got a 7.9 on IMDb!"... well hopefully that score will be down by the time you read this, because this was the most painfully badly written and acted pieces of drivel I've had to sit through in recent memory (and my friend has chosen some real tripe at the video store).

Basically, a very corny tale of a journalist discovering a reclusive pop-maker who was set up during a heist a while back. The whole thing is unbelievable in every respect. The woman playing the journalist (not even credited in IMDb) has *ONE* expression and *ONE* flat tone of voice throughout the whole film (and got to be incredibly annoying even during the opening scene). The sound is poorly dubbed throughout. I felt sorry and ashamed for the actors I recognised, since I know some of them can do so much better.

Only two things make this more than a 1/10: pretty pictures of the caribbean and people free-diving (ludicrously tacked on to the story) and the music is passable, but don't watch the actor pretending to sing or it will spoil it for you.

That just scrapes it up to a 2/10...

This is one of the few times that I have been badly mislead by the reviews on IMDb! I avoided this film in the past because of this, but thought it would be a good "soft" film to watch on video with with a friend and his wife (she doesn't like difficult films).

What a revelation! I understand that people who have read the book may be disappointed, but as an uneducated viewer this is a fantastic film! Novel situation, novel location (beautiful images, even though the beach was re-modeled), novel plot, novel characters (all of whom are wildly different yet possible to sympathise with - except maybe for Bugs)... this film has everything in it that I find so desperately lacking in the average Hollywood pulp I'm forced to watch with friends.

And I *liked* the fact that the film made a few surprising changes in style... I hate knowing the end of a story at least an hour before it finally grinds its inevitable way there (see any "action" film).

I am very surprised that people found this film so tasteless!

Without giving too much away (I'm sure anyone reading the other comments will already have some idea of what is involved) I don't see why what happens here is so different from what happens in so many trashy soldier/cop films. Perhaps the very fact that it's a "normal" situation gone wrong is what people find shocking?

Anyway, I saw it last night on video with the rest of the gang and we had several collective laugh-out-loud moments as well as some collective wincing sessions. It's full of shocks, surprises and "oh no, he's not going to..." scenes and keeps you on your toes.

Very bad things? No. Very good! 8/10.

... but not worth the huge scores it's received here (in my humble opinion).

The big shock ending (I won't spoil it) I guessed from the trailer already, Bruce Willis' mumbling his way throughout the film gets a little tiring after a while and I found myself wishing more had happened (as regards Cole doing his thing for the spirit world) when, suddenly, the film ended.

This film is a nice, old-fashioned piece which tells a story - nothing more, nothing less.

There is no clunky plot, no facile dialogue, no stupid and improbable "action", no irritating music...

What there is (and I have to disagree with a previous user's comments on stereotypes) is a set of characters you can sympathise with who end up in a situation you can understand. I don't think the characters are stereotypes (the prison guards are hard, but not evil-incarnate; the other prisoners also have their good and bad sides) and I think the film sets the atmosphere well and doesn't have a "this is a Hollywood version of..." feeling about it.

In fact, contrary to what I've read from other comments, I felt that the only thing that spoils it was the very odd-couple shtick that other reviewers wanted more of - it went a bit too far a bit too often and occasionally ended up being too charicature for real-life.

Overall though - nice.

I've described this film as surprising... this is true in many respects. The subject material (black man wrongly accused), the characters (people you expect to be stereotypes often show uncharacteristic attitudes during the film), the production...

All of these factors make for a refreshingly unusual film, especially for its time (1949). The only possible spoilers being the sometimes cheesy dialogue and occasional high moral stance.

But, if you happen across it when you weren't planning to watch a film, you might find yourself like me - staying up into the middle of the night just to see what happens.

I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who have already written plenty about the plotline etc. etc. so I'll keep it short..

I liked the unusual style of the camerawork, except for the fact that when you see it in the cinema like I did you get a very chaotic image filling your field of view for two hours. It gave me a headache!

This style probably works fine if viewed on the small screen, indeed it has a lot of the MTV feel about it, but in my opinion it was just a bit too zoomed in, the panning backwards and forwards a bit too fast and too much, and the image a bit too blurry (you could tell it was video) for theatre viewing.

Sorry, but as a *film* I give it 8/10 As a video rental I would give it 9/10.

I had looked at reviews on IMDB before going to the film, since I thought the trailers looked good but the film was only being shown at half past midnight. So when I decided to go I was still a bit worried by some of the comments about a lack of plot.

But I really don't know why people have thought that. Maybe it's because there is no obvious, predictable and classical (in the literary sense) storyline, no "good" people or "evil" people, no simple build-up to a largely cliche climax...

No matter, I for one thought that there was a surprising amount of detail and subtlety - both in storyline and people's actions as well as in the settings used. The construction guys trying to rescue the "bad" guys from the wrecked cars, for example, and did anyone else catch the relevance of the window being painted over at the apartment in Nice or of the chase under the metro-bridge? :-)

There was also a very low *CRINGE* factor.. apart from the computers still going "bleep" all the time. Most other objects/scenes/situations/people were handled with a good helping of realism. Oh, there were two pretty awful "Irish" accents but we'll gloss over that.

And of course.... the CAR CHASES! No crappy Hollywood exploding, stationary dummies or whatever.. no no, *real* cars driving *really* fast and having *real* crashes! I was particularly surprised when one car smashed past a restaurant terrace.. and actually took a few (real) people with it!!!

So, all in all, just the kind of action film I have always been saying they should make - spiced up with a little international flavour to bring back the Bond feeling we've been missing in the last few Bond films.

My mark: 8/10

A couple of dead-beats living together in a friend's flat find out that they're going to have to move out. Now they have to get hold of some money, and sort out their love-lives while they're about it.

Basically a buddy movie, but with some absolutely brilliant moments - made me laugh out loud several times. I won't describe what creates these scenes, since it could spoil it for you, but I would definitely recommend it for anyone who can speak French or read the subtitles (as I did).

9/10

I had seen the standard shots of this film when it came out and thought that the comedy seemed pretty bad - which put me off seeing it in the cinema.

However, now that it's been on TV I would like to recommend it to anyone who wants to see a film which has an original story, interesting characters, unusual settings, great acting, great photography.... generally the opposite of the usual Hollywood fare I usually have to suffer because of my friends.

So, to sum up, it's been marketed wrongly - this is not a film which you should see for a laugh; it's a film which constantly surprises - not least in dramatic turns in the story.

Loved it - 9/10

I have absolutely *no* idea why the other voters appear to have rated this film so highly (this being the first comment to be registered) but I thought it was awful.

Basically, this is the film-maker's gay fantasy about Bowie and Iggy Pop brought to the screen. I am by no means homophobic, and the gay issue is not what bothers me, what *does* is that the whole story is complete and utter rubbish. It suggests that Bowie was preying on schoolboys, indulging in bi-sexual orgies and infatuated by Iggy Pop, all the while simpering about with a permanent "I'm camp and melancholy" expression on his face.

This would be bearable but for the ludicrous screenplay (boys walking into Disney-style animated sunsets, Iggy Pop seducing the journalist (presumably the figure played by the writer in his fantasies) on a roof-top, suggestions of links with Oscar Wilde, etc.), poor acting and cheap feel. The music isn't up to scratch either, unfortunately.

There are moments of gut-wrenching corn which are so bad, they would almost be good... if this were a satire.

3/10

Okay, I'll keep it short:

First hour: fairly standard, fairly cheesey. Nice to see an oil-rig on screen :-)

Beginning of second hour: US knocks the MIR... *again*. Okay, I'll turn my brain off and ignore all the technical errors.

Last half hour: oh God, when will it all end? Yeeuurrgh.. what a sickening finale.

Comment: Everyone seems to think the effects were great, but I thought they often looked fairly amateur - the asteroid stuff really looked like a studio to me, especially when they "zoom in" from space.

Verdict: predictable, loud, flawed trash. 4/10