p.bierschenk

Spoiler Alert I think, there is no "double-end showdown" in the final sequence of this wonderful movie. It's rather the happiest ending this tragedy could possibly get. Tenneray (Douglas) is the less lovable character, he's the one who made a (pretty poor) living from his fame before, he's the one to come out with the idea to kill one another for money, and he's the one who actually dies in the end. The sequence that shows Cross' death is cut between two deaths of Tenneray with Cross as the survivor, simply to show, that he (T) would not really have profited from staying alive - he just would have remained an a**hole. If only one man will get out alive, why not the not-so-bad guy? "Let the good one die!" simply has become a worn out clichee in the last decades among 'ambitious' directors.

This movie probably was meant to be a "portrayal of the hell and insecurities that the unattractive and misunderstood go through during that strange transition to junior high and puberty". I took this quotation from a user-comment on "Welcome to the Dollhouse". But this one by far does not reach the quality of Todd Solondz' film. Every time you start to feel some compassion for the main characters, there's another episode of the useless framestory (Charlie Brown and the redhaired girl meet again in their late thirties...). This movie is not the reconstruction of an ugly era (the mid-70ies), it's rather a case of making a story from memory-errors. There aren't any romans left who could laugh about the decoration in "Quo Vadis?" or "Gladiator", but some of us still remember the seventies (at least I hope so).

I hate this movie, and there is hardly anything to add to the other negative comments on this page. Except of two details: 1. Does the "blueness" of a film directly correspond with quality? The more scenes with blue light, blue steam, blue sparks there are in a movie, the more you can be sure that you're wasting your time with it. Or is there really a subpopulation of video-consumers out there, who don't realize they're watching something horror-related until they see the blue light? 2. If the future will be like it is shown in this movie, the educational level of spaceship crewmembers will decline to a 1950ies-standard. Nobody - in particular the black crewmen(!) - has ever heard of terms like "singularity". Silly.

Another comment said that this film "completely transcends its time". That's true, but I wonder how the contemporary audience interpreted this "transcendence". Was not-talking-about-war in the last days of WW2 understood as talking about war in a different way or simply as escapism?