billcallinderscott-2607

For the first 4 or five episode it was the type of series that left me wanted to shout at the lead actress and ask "Why don't you tell someone". So infuriating it was almost painful to watch and yet I did. I though she just has to confide in somebody eventually which, of course, she did. However if I written this review without watching the whole series I would have given it just four stars.

Even then after watching the whole series there were so many loose ends I thought it can't just end there. Having checked it seems that after this series won a fistful of awards then, somewhat reluctantly it seems, Foxtel may agree to a second series which it appears the writers had in mind. I can only say it would be madness not to do so. The loose ends are numerous and really have to be tied up even if we don't see what happens in the end. Somethings can be left to the viewers imagination.

Having said that it introduced an alien object that hasn't even been discussed but seems to be doing something to ready humanity for a change. But the change isn't fully explained even though it's implied it's going to be as a result of environmental changes. We have an "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" theme developing in the finale with two branches. One branch includes Anna, the Greeny, eco-warrior Jens Jorgenssen and a few others with the second branch including a bunch of psychos that haven't transitioned to their new state properly and need the help of the likes of Anna and Jens. The "toxic waste" isn't explained properly as it appears to be causing huge environmental problems but was introduced by the eco-warrior Jens in collusion with Anna's father and a couple of others. Just what is it really and what's it's purpose? Finally there is a sudden explosion of strange moss which is largely ignored but looks like it causes dogs to go mad if they ate any and it looks like it cause some people to get bark like sores on their bodies.

So unexplained mysteries abound and really need answering or a good storyline and series will be relegated to the likes of other, especially those with a SciFi theme, that showed great promise but were cancelled.

A lot of good actors obviously needed some extra cash because for the life of me I can see no other reason they appeared in this drivel. A script that is so bad as to be laughable and looked like it had been written by a computer that was badly programmed. And yet it's is the work of David Ayer who wrote the screenplay for Training Day!? So is this just a one off case of writer's block? Let's hope so.

Cliché after cliché and a set of characters that were so poor that any actor that appeared in this tosh will have to do something sensational to recover their reputations. Mind you considering the rubbish that's produced currently, appearing in this ridiculous movie may not be a problem.

So were there any redeeming aspects to this movie? Not really although the special effects were OK. The music made it seem like a series of music videos that were separated by a music score. So many disappointments and yet it's made $745.6 million at the box office. I think that says an awful lot about the standard of publicity than it does about the standard of this movie.

As already mentioned the influence of Sergio Leone is clear with the usual assorted mysterious characters. None more so than Madelaine, played by Eva Green. The mute "banker" for the ruthless gang Henry Delarue played excellently by Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

There was even a moral backstory about good people being turned bad by big corporations who used Delarue to force people to sell land rich in "Black Gold", i.e. oil. Their need for an air of respectability meant their dealings with Delarue were kept secret and although they didn't want him to use bully-boy tactics and violence it was obvious that this was in order to maintain plausible deniability.

What made this film stand out, apart from a very decent revenge storyline, was the superb cinematography whose director of photography, Jens Schlosser, did a fantastic job aided by a large special effects team. He actually knows how to do night/low light scenes where you can actually see what's going on. I see so many movies today where anything could be on the screen. It's a case of the proverbial black cat, in a cellar, with the lights switched off. He should give classes on how to do it properly. As already mentioned by other reviewers the colours were superb and I agree the SFx team probably had some influence in everything being so vibrant. Overall a standout film with a bonkers ending but it's what you'd expect from a very good cowboy film. The heroes have to ride off into the sunset.

Like many others who love Sci-Fi and/or Fantasy TV and movies there's little around at present to interest me. So when I read the synopsis for this show on another site it looked interesting enough to give it a chance. Even though I had no idea initially that it was targeted at teenagers it quickly became obvious that they were the target audience. Regardless I continued to watch and after a few episode of series 1 I was pleased I did. The young actors started off looking a bit nervous and tentative but I was pleased to see their confidence in their roles develop and quickly they were very good indeed. As is common the adult actors did their part in making the shows very watchable.

The story lines were strong and after each episode left you wanting to see what happens next. The special effects were good and were used very well to add to the production values of the show. As a person who left their teenage years decades ago it was very watchable and much better than a load of TV series being broadcast at present. A show that will please everyone in the family. Of its kind I'd classify it as exceptional.

People have said that this a film about all the choices that a person can make in their life. It's sort of true but in this case it seems to me that it's about a boy who lives outside of linear time. He can see the future which as we later discover is an aspect of linear time which is the same as the present and past to Nemo.

He, as the old man at the "end" of his life, recounts what he did during it. However as someone outside of time as we perceive it , every choice that he could have made he actually did. So stories branch and split again. What happens in each timeline is governed by the Theory of Chaos, so a small change in one place can have a dramatic effect elsewhere, i.e. The Butterfly Effect which is demonstrated in the film by the boiling of an egg in South America and heavy rain as a result in New York which washes away a telephone number of importance to Nemo. So even though Nemo's relationship, in different timelines, with three women is at the heart of a lot of the film different outcomes within each timeline is also shown. Even within his own timelines what happens to him on a personal level can be different depending on various possibilities. So in some he dies or is in a permanent vegetative state.

Complex ideas in astrophysics, chaos theory and the multiverse theory have been translated into a movie of real complexity. Did the director succeed? Well yes and the end, which disappointed some, is actually referred to by Nemo in his cosmology TV programme presenter timeline and as a comment made by Anna, a love interest in many timelines but not in this instance, when she tells him that she's on Mars doing measurements to prove the hypothesis of the Big Crunch which is the reverse of the Big Bang. She also, as a throw away comment, mentions that it'll start at a specific time on a specific day which we know will be the exact time of his death. So the film ends with him laughing as the timeline rewinds and everything goes in reverse; the Big Crunch.

A strange film that just don't do anything for me. It's called Pi but at the start you can see that it's not about mathematics since the number Pi as is shown is wrong. Maybe it was deliberate and there's a hidden meaning or it could be when Pi was displayed on a calculator it was only shown to a certain number of digits so the rest was made up. And then there's the line the mathematics "genius", Max, comes out with during some rambling monologue to a Rabbi, i.e. "It's just a number. I'm sure you've written down every two hundred sixteen digit number. You've translated all of them. You've intoned them all. Haven't you? But what's it gotten you? The number is nothing!" Well it seems that there's 9.9*(10^215) permutations of 216 digits and I leave you to work out how long it'd take to write them out but it's longer than Aronofsky thought.

So it wasn't a film about the wonders of mathematics or why Pi is such a mind-blowing number when all it's just the length of the circumference of a circle divided by it's radius. However at some positions within the number Pi will be every possible sequence of 216 digits. Is it just about a man going mad, as some mathematics geniuses did, but without the distraction of mathematics? Whatever it is it's a film that many like but for the life of me I can't see why.

This is typical conspiracy theory fayre and this time is centred around a multi-national corporation. So it's part of a common theme that abounds in TV and cinema and has the usual twists and turns that are to be expected. Has it got anything that separates it from the rest? Not really but the cast are very good with a storyline that, as many reviewers have mentioned, often beggars belief. The level of stupidity is quite astounding especially considering that the characters are supposed to be smart and worldly-wise. People who are supposed to be suspicious of anyone they don't know believe strangers even after they are discovered to be liars. Friends who prove to be untrustworthy are given secret information over, and over, and over, .. again.

Even after all this it's still a decent, if not outstanding, series which I have continued to watch largely because of the cast as opposed to the script. It's hard to ignore the stupidity but the cast do a very good job of putting across an unbelievable story. Sometimes a great cast can raise a mediocre script into something that's worth watching.

This is a movie that doesn't rely on special effects, it doesn't rely on gore or incessant action, there are no high speed car chases and it doesn't have a load of scantily clad women to try and attract an audience. So what's it got going for it? Simple, it's a great story and screenplay, some great actors doing a great job, great direction and a it poses a question, that's hinted at throughout the film, that's so difficult you'd never want to be put in the position of having to answer it.

The twists and turns to the plot are really secondary to this question but even though you may work out what's happened it'll still have you thinking would you have done the same thing. It's not a spoiler but anyone who takes the time to watch the film will see a closing scene that leaves you wondering if after everything that's happened is this what the main character wanted.

I can't speak too highly of the film as a whole but I'd like to pay a special tribute to Ben Affleck. He'd already won an Oscar for co-writing Good Will Hunting with Matt Damon so this film should not surprise anyone that the script is so good. Considering its quality it's rather surprising that it wasn't received as well as it should have been. Maybe that's because it appeals to a more discerning audience, who knows? Anyway it shows that Affleck's directing abilities shown in Argo weren't a one off and I would expect there's plenty more to come from him.

Roland Emmerich is a director I greatly admire so what on earth possessed him to try and copy the style of Michael Bay; and do a really poor job of it to boot!? And the scriptwriter was the rich boy James Vanderbilt whose only real claim was that he "reinvented", or should we say copied, the Spider Man movies buy sticking Amazing in front. I like Jamie Foxx and I hate to say it but he was miscast and pitiful in this role. And then to round it all off it was basically, as other reviewers have stated, a mish-mash of Olympus Has Fallen and Die Hard with Channing Tatum as a "Lite" version of Bruce Willis or Gerard Butler. Without the blatant plagiarism I may have given this a 5 if I tried really hard to be objective and treat it on its own merits but I can't so it gets a 2 for half decent action scenes. I thought this type of stuff was left to the likes of "The Day The Earth Stopped", "Independence Daysaster" and equally bad straightforward rip-offs.

It's as if it was trying to get an Underworld vibe going. A couple of the actors, Bill Nighy and Kevin Grevioux (who co-wrote both this and Underworld), were in Underworld, Aaron Eckhart looks a quite like Scott Speedman, two very easy on the eye talented lead actresses, Kate Beckinsale and Yvonne Strahovski and a war between two groups of supernatural beings with another different supernatural being standing between them. Decent special effects and a well known and talented cast raise it above the "B" movie status. But even though the idea behind the movie is OK, the script comes across as though it's been written by a computer program that cuts and pastes bits from better scripts but ends up with something that's weak. With this cast they really deserved something better. What had the ingredients in place to create something that would have been rated 7 or more on this site was let down by poor script writing and if a bit more effort had been put into this area it may have been a lot less disappointing for lovers of Sci Fi and Fantasy films. I'm a Sci-Fi/Fantasy film fanatic and even I struggled to give it a 6. The script warrants only 1.5 which impeded the actors who made the best of a bad deal. For their efforts I would give 4-5 and the extra 1-2 was because of the special effects which, although generic by todays standard, were pretty decent.

Many reviewers have indicated that the film has multiple levels and loving it but many just hating it as a poor standard Sci Fi film. However as mentioned the film has many layers to it and the deeper you go the better it becomes. At first it just seems to be a bog standard teen high school movie with the "teenagers" all actually being in their mid to late 20s. It's like High School Musical with no music but retaining the typical teenage angst. We're told at the start that Democracy has failed and it appears to be have replaced with a worldwide military dictatorship. The war with the bugs is introduced and the theme of human superiority rears its head. Underestimating the enemy is a general theme which harks back to the Vietnam wars, French and US, but once the mistake is realised then it's assumed that better weaponry and inherently superior human intellect will prevail and the human race will be dominant which echoes the Nazi philosophy about racial purity and genetic superiority. A negotiated settlement is put forward by the more enlightened but is dismissed as offensive. The ending is left open-ended as Verhoeven anticipated a sequel or at least hoped for one with an increased budget. Hence the continued Nationalistic rhetoric and the emphasis on better weapons with the lack of people to use them meaning that kids are now enlisting. The parallel with the use of children as soldiers in some wars is obvious but here is all part of doing your bit! As a pure Sci Fi movie it's poor apart from the special effects with average acting and a seemingly average script which appears superficial. But with the underlying themes it makes it an outstanding anti-war film.

I can't add too much to what has already been said but the problem I had from the gecko was the casting. Mainly Mark Wahlberg and his on-screen daughter, Nicola Peltz. Him as a scientist of sorts is ludicrous and she doesn't seem to understand that the daughter of a poverty stricken father really shouldn't look as if she walked onto the wrong set and should have ended up on Beverly Hills, 90210. Her full makeup at all times and ever-so short shorts, Rodeo Drive skinny jeans and mini skirts just can't make me forgive her lack of any ability. The only actor that seemed to be going to add something was killed off near the start of the film and the opening sequence that showed some promise just left us in limbo until I almost forgot that it had even happened. I guess this was to develop the characters of the main protagonists. Unfortunately that was a total waste of time. The special Fx and action scenes raised my rating from 1 to 3 out of 10 but they couldn't make the film any less bonkers than it was. I'm a fan of Michael Bay but I guess everyone can have an off day. I've avoided any major spoilers but really didn't need to bother as I couldn't spoil this movie.

Although the need for an American version may be unnecessary to many people it's obvious that the average American, whoever they are, does not like sub-titles. Or anything that's foreign come to think of it. Sofie Gråbøl echo'd this point when she said that she couldn't see the need for the US version of The KiIlling, Forbrydelsen in the original Danish TV series, and could only assume that Americans didn't like sub-titles. This is another example of a great foreign TV series being transform into an American one. I have watched a couple of episodes and it isn't too bad. Well it's better than most of the rubbish that's made so I've got to give Netflix some kudos for at least bringing it to an American audience. Of course it should have been the French original that was sufficient but it would mean that more people in the US would have to start reading sub- titles and, come to think of it, it would also be a good idea to stop complaining about English accents when they originate outside the USA. In the USA it's a ratings game, more so than in the UK or other countries it seems, so for the American reviewers who have been negative it's your own country folk that are to blame for the "need" to create these cloned series. The Returned has only just started so at least give the show a chance.