rikalonius

I'm greatly saddened that a show with obvious access to a good budge and a strong narrative voice can be so bereft of historic accuracy. If this were just a show, and not a documentary style offering, I might be more forgiving. Even Rome, the HBO series, got far more right than this or any of the season 2 episodes I've watched.

There is nothing here, save the names of certain players, that is accurate to recorded history. There is a reason that Cleopatra smuggling herself into the palace is the default setting for all narratives, because it is recorded by two ancient historians and Caesar's own commentaries. The idea that Ptolemy kidnapped Caesar and Cleopatra had to rescue him is the worst kind of historical revisionism, and worse, the actually events would have been much more exciting than anything that was shown.

There is no reason to go line by line, because there is more wrong than right. Suffice it to say it isn't entertaining and the viewer who isn't already familiar with the events will come away more ignorant of Caesar's life than had they seen nothing at all. What a shameful waste of resources and time.

Why must television shows and movies continue to depict falsehoods when the truth would serve them better? The life of Gaius Julius Caesar is ripe with gripping tales to tell, and yet this touches on none them. It has good production value and good visuals, though wildly inaccurate portrayals of Romans at war, so it is a shame that it was so horribly inaccurate.

Caesar didn't serve as a legionary. He was on the staff of the governor in Asia minor. Not only did they leave out how he defied Sulla and fled to Sabine territory, but left out how he won the corona civica, the second highest military award in Rome, during his first battle, the amphibious invasion of the island of Lesbos. The show fixates on Spartacus, of which there is no historical link to Caesar's participation, even though as an elected Military Tribune, it is quite possible he was involved. It leaves out his run in with pirates, one of the classic tales of Caesar's bravery and audacity.

The show completely leaves out that he was Qaestor and Praetor of Hispania. And, Julia didn't marry Pompey after Cornelia's death, it wasn't until 10 years later. Also, Julia wasn't even born until 76 BC. She would have been a child during the Spartacus uprising. I could go on for a while, but there is little point. There is nothing of historical value to be found in this episode.

I hope the rest of the episodes are not this bad, but I have little hope.

I ended up watching this as a bit of a joke. Joke was on me, it turned out to be quit good. I won't spoil it, but it isn't just an animated rehash of the 60s television show. There are some great, esoteric lore references. It always retains its 60s style, including goofy riddles, and fascicle plot points, i.e. the Bat Rocket, but that is the fun of it. It seriously hangs a lamp shade on the source material while also poking some fun at the later day grittiness of the current Dark Knight.

One of the best things is when it's all over and during the credits Batman and Catwoman perform some strange dance moves while inter-cutting to Batman doing various things with bombs. If you don't know why that is funny, you should probably catch up on some old 60s Batman.

I think it was much better than critics give it credit for. That being said, I can understand, i think, why some didn't like it. We all bring our own biases into films. It was clear to me, from reading some of the professional critical reviews that they would have rated it higher if the events had transpired closer to their personal expectations. I cannot articulate why that is without spoilers, so here goes.

**Spoilers**

Much of the controversy revolves around Jim's decision to short- circuit Aurora's (Jennifer Lawrence) pod. In the film, Jim has been woken up by a subtle malfunction, caused by a tiny fragment of meteor getting past the ships deflection technology. Jim (Chris Pratt) is awake and finds he was woken up 90 years prior to the arrival at their destination, which means he is trapped on the ship, alone, for the remainder of his life.

Jim goes through a series of stages, similar to the film Groundhog Day. He tries to wake the crew, but cannot get through the protective firewall that guards their sleeping compartment. He tries to engineer his pod to put him back to sleep, but that does work, and through research, realizes he can't go back to sleep. So Jim, after meeting a robot bartender, goes through these psychological milestones. Grief, acceptance, etc. After a year, however, he is in complete despair. He considers suicide, but talks himself out of it. Then he sees one of the other passengers in her pod. Aurora (Yes, as in Disney's Aurora).

At first Aurora's unconscious form plays the part of Wilson in the film Castaway. Someone for Jim to talk to. She's a novelist, and a writer for a New York magazine back on Earth. Through exposure to her books and her interviews, he starts to feel an attraction to her. For months he convinces himself that he cannot wake her up, rationalizing his feelings away over and over until he can't any longer. So then does, what to many, is the unthinkable.

From that point we go through a romance subplot built on a lie. For some critics, they would have rather this had played out as a psychological thriller, wherein Jim is becomes the antagonist. It could have easily have been made this way. Instead the romance goes on for a while until the Robot bartender, due to a mistake by Jim, gives away the secret that Jim woke her up. She is, naturally, enraged.

The next act is spent with Jim trying to apologize to her. We can understand why she would be reluctant, and to keep her distance, which she does. But then the ship starts to break down due to a chain reaction that started two years earlier, and what had triggered Jim's pod to malfunction. The malfunctions begin to cascade and wake up a member of the crew, Gus. Gus figures out what Jim did, but there is too much work to do to fix the ship for moral condemnation. Later Aurora looks to commiserate with Gus about what a horrible thing Jim did. Gus agrees, but says it was an understandable human reaction to his situation.

Unfortunately Gus wasn't woken up as safely as Jim had been, and his abrupt discharge from hyper-sleep has severally damaged his internal organs. As he begins his death throws he gives his ID badge to Jim and tells the couple to take care of each other, and to fix the ship. Reluctantly Aurora helps Jim find the major problem with the gravity drive, and the movie turns into a Titanic style disaster film. This seemed to be another sore subject with critics, in that movie abruptly shifted gears.

In the end Jim offers to sacrifice himself to save the ship, but Aurora begins to realize that finality of that. It isn't articulated, but maybe she suddenly had the inkling that she would be desperately alone. It is one thing to refuse to forgive someone who is right there, and you can always forgive at your leisure, it is another to realize you'll be facing the same desperate decision Jim did. In the end Aurora performs a heroic act to save him.

Afterwards Jim finds a way to put Aurora back to sleep using a medical machine, but he would have to activate it from the outside. He offers her the life he stole from her, and in return, she chooses to stay by his side. I thought it was a nice ending, but many others were not satisfied with the happily ever after concept.

Overall I think the execution could have been better in some places, and that is a valid criticism. Still I think it is well worth the watch.

I used to watch this as a very young boy but I didn't remember much outside of the fact that there was dinosaurs and 3 humans and some lizards.

I started watching it again 42 years later, quite by accident and realized, despite the pour production value, which can be distracting for a modern viewer, the stories are actually pretty clever for their time.

The show follows a family of 3, widowed Rick and his two children Will and Holly into a pocket universe containing alien creatures with a surprising H.G. Wells-esque lore, advance technology that maintains the weather, pre-Neanderthal like hominids, and dinosaurs. Visitors of all varieties come and go, but the Marshall's can't seem to catch a break.

A few episodes are written by Star Trek veterans like Walter Koenig and DC Fontana. Koenig's "The Stranger" is a good example of some of the quality story telling. It could be great retold with modern effects, provided the writers don't try to dumb it down with overly ambiguous plot arcs, e.g. LOST.

That was how Pliny the Younger began his letter to Emperor Titus as he carefully recounted his own experiences on the day Vesuvius erupted, and it is how I begin this review today.

Though my mind shrinks from remembering, I will begin. It was an awful work. A mindless film with no redeeming qualities other than some cheap effects. The Vesuvius eruption is overwrought with scene of things that never occurred. Balls of fire, giant tsunamis, buildings razed that still stand today. Historically vacuous.

Well, maybe the story was good, you'll say. No, no it wasn't. It was a simplistic story of star-crossed lovers, one a rich maiden, and the other slave. Sound familiar. Of course it does. Some would say it is a ripoff of Titanic, but it is far worse than that. It isn't even good enough to warrant the Harlequin press logo.

The villain is a senator who dresses like an Emperor, and does Emperor like things to invoke Commodus from Gladiator. He is played poorly by the otherwise talented Kiefer Sutherland, who can't choose an accent. I can't stress enough that the whole film is drivel from start to finish. The fight scenes have been done a hundred times, and are nothing but yawn inducing. The characters do nothing to cause you to care about them. In fact, as others have said, you can't wait to see how the volcano swallows them up.

I don't watch Game of Thrones so i don't know how talented the male lead is supposed to be, but he stinks here. Don't waste your time.

I was really excited about this movie, but then I let early critical reviews poison my outlook. I ended up going, but with decidedly more trepidation than I needed to have. The movie was perfectly good. I think it might have been a little better when you understand the lore, but even to the uninitiated, if you pay attention, I still think it introduces its characters well.

While some of the action was so, for lack of a better word, epic in scale, it suffered, sometimes, looking cartoon-y, but those moments are short lived. And the good stuff more than makes up for the bad. All in all it is well worth the time to watch.

Another criticism was the acting. To that I say nay. The acting is just fine. I think these newcomers do a good job. There was once a time when Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher where unknown newcomers and today they are household names. I don't want to digress to much, but save for Oscar Isaac, the cast here are betters actors than the cast of The Force Awakens.

I waited until i was 28 episodes in before I gave a review. I'm pleasantly surprised that after all that time I'm still having a good time watching this show. Not every episode is solid gold, but none of them are stinkers, and the core cast is great. A galactic A-Team vs Zurg and his many mercenary henchmen. Buzz is a delight as the do the right thing, self sacrificing, and very capable good cop leader. His co-pilot, Mira Nova, who is just barely out of rookie status provides his best counter-balance. She is a well rounded character. XR or Experimental Ranger is a comedic R2-D2 meets Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet. And there is the large, but lovable Booster, the most inexperience member of the team.

The plots are standard fare but so well executed, with clever dialog, that'll you easily forget that. Besides, Buzz Lightyear is light-hearted. It is more comedy than anything, but that isn't a negative. It is truly a fun and enjoyable show.

To be made into a movie. This is not it. Other than pilfering a few character names, a few quotes, and the title, Malick's Thin Red Line is so far removed from Jones' novel as to almost be unrecognizable.

Jones' flowing fictional narrative based on his Company's actions at Guadalcanal from disembarking the ship to embarkation is a brutally realistic portrayal of infantry life and the nuances of combat in the mountains of Guadalcanal. Malik retains none of this brilliance and ops for art house melodrama on some fantasy island with no discernible resemblance to the actual local.

Malik takes the character of Witt, a secondary character in the novel, who was a racist Kentuckian rabble rouser with a penchant for shirking duty when his superiors annoyed him, and portrays as some kind of Christ figure. He begins the film living in noble savage utopia among the peaceful Melanesian natives. In reality these natives used to ambush Japanese patrols and sell their corpses to the US Marines for candy. Solomon Island tribes have a long history of tribal warfare, but Malik would have use believe it is the touch of the industrialized world that has suddenly corrupted their virgin paradise.

The next glaring departure from the novel I noticed was the character of Lt. Col Tall. In the novel he was a younger man, an overachiever to be sure, but a capable and brave commander. Malik decided to go with the old heartless commander routine. Malik concocts a scene were John Travolta plays a General who takes advantage of an aging Tall's desire to make rank at the expense of troops. In the film Tall is shown disinterested in artillery, declaring that it is used only to give the ground troops the perception that they are giving the enemy hell. In the novel Tall was a huge fan of artillery and blasted away at the mountain for hours before deploying the company. In addition, in the novel, the protagonists followed two other companies who had attempted to take the same hill the day before. Maybe it is in the five hour cut, but I doubt it, where Jones describes how the Japanese prominently displayed the heads of dead American, on pikes, with their severed genitalia shoved in their mouths as a warning to the soldiers that followed. I guess that wouldn't fit the narrative.

I go on for much longer, but my point is made. The movie is not a cinematic depiction of Jones' novel, it doesn't accurately depict infantry life, or life on Guadalcanal, and it gives us no insight into the Battle. That's what makes it pretentious, and that's what makes it a bad movie. It is ultimately preaching to the choir. Those who like this kind of movie, and who agree with the narrative, will gush about it. To me it was uncompelling.

I remember this fondly and when I went to an certain online movie site to see if I could introduce my wife to it via the power of streaming, I was incredulous to find that it wasn't just not available for streaming, but non existent in their database. How sad that such a good movie is being tossed to the dustbin of history.

It has its flaws, but I chalk those up to its made for TV budget. People are nitpicking the hairstyles, but very few big budget films take the time to accurately portray such details, let alone a small budget TV movie. Look at Brian's Song for instance. Small budget, big heart. All this doesn't, however, detract from An American Christmas Carol being a memorable take on Dickens' classic. I would encourage anyone who hasn't viewed it, to do so. I promise you won't be disappointed.

As an American who lived 3 and a half years in London, I found this episode to be heinous. As has already been said, it was an attempt to cram in all the over-used stereotypes into as short a time as possible. This is nothing new, but in this case it was done quite badly. I've often commented that any American show or movie that takes a trip to London must have obligatory shots of Tower Bridge, Parliament, and Piccadilly Circus. There must always be a reference to Bond, snobbery, and tea. The fact that they crammed no football hooligans into the mix was stunning, but they managed to make Oxford look as though it was down in W1.

I was deeply offended, as any Brit who watched it is right to be.