Reviews

Tedious and juvenile... I could hardly wait for the predictable ending. I liked watching the credits more than the film itself.

The acting was stiff.... you might say .. robotic. The plot was unbearably predictable. The writing was one cliché piled on another. There was over reliance on cartoonish action scenes.

I loved the very first Planet of the Apes.. over 40 years ago. It had both social and psychological reveals. How ape-like human society is.. and how humanity has failed. The present film series coat-tails on the popularity and success of the first one. This film has no new reveals or insights except for shallow clichés.

Some of the poorly expressed themes. There are good apes and bad apes, there are good humans and bad ones. Teens often rebel and then grow to see the wisdom of parents. Brains vs brawn .. sometimes one wins, sometimes the other.

Poor acting, poor plot, poor writing... that's OK.. lets blow something up.

I stayed up until 2am watching this jewel. The tension never stops building. I am ready to watch it again. It is similar to "Funny Games" in the way most of the suspense and horror are due to anticipation of events rather than the gory scenes now too common in current horror films.

The film uses actors that have mostly disappeared from the screen, and it has a kind of realism that is almost documentary. At times the acting and directing seem ... amateurish... by current standards, but this only adds to the reality. I think this is a "B" movie that has improved with age.

The atmosphere, the culture, the legend brought to life, the score, the people, it was magical realism done right. I read a lot of insulting reader comments on this film, and I am so glad I went to see it anyway. It was long, but it was in no way slow. I was riveted.

True, it did have a documentary feel... but I like documentaries... you could think of it as a documentary on Inuit legends and story telling as seen by the story tellers and their listeners. The effect was to allow the audience to share the feelings of persons in an alien culture.

The score was eclectic, effectively changing from Inuit chants to Gyuto Monk chants, and then to eerie Bulgarian choral music, and back to Inuit. Again, the effect was to blur cultural boundaries and move the viewer away from the familiar and into the Inuit.

If there was one small fault, the subtitles were done in white, which did not always show up against the landscape. Yellow might have been a better choice.

I suspect that if you are a fan of Jim Jarmusch's "Dead Man" (as I am) then you will be one of this film as well.

I have to admit, had I known about the one-take, one-camera, cast-of-thousands angle, then I would have found this film more interesting. However, I saw it unaware of the technique used to make the film and therefore formed an opinion based on its face value.

It was agonizingly tedious. Shot after shot of the playground of the Czars... all that power, all that money, and no taste what so ever.

Watching this video (I hesitate to call it a film) was enough to make one long for Lenin and Trotsky.

Viva L'Revolution!

It consisted of what seemed like hours of fantasy sword fighting. The kind where no blood is seen. Childish cartoon-like violence, punctuated by simple-minded dialog and story line.

At least in the original Zorro, Douglas Fairbanks does some impressive acrobatic leaps (assisted by a hidden trampoline), and later on TV, Guy Williams charms us with bloodless swordplay that is teasingly brief. But in this film, the fantasy sword fights are all faked up with walking up walls and flying, and they seem to go on forever.

By the way, there is no consistency to the magical abilities of the fighters. Sometimes they can fly, sometimes not. Anything to make the fight more fair.

The love interest in the story is a mass murdering bandit who happens to be cute, so that makes him ok. The dialog and the storyline are both childish. But not childish in a captivating way... as in City of Lost Children... rather in an awkward unthinking way.

This picture wanted to make murder and slashing people with swords seem like.. fun. Something you do on a blind date; charming, sexy, and winsome.

I found it to be creepy and insidious. Give me Hannibal any day.. where murder is depicted as horrible and repulsive.