Reviews

When the best you can say about a movie is that the cinematography was good and that the death of a child was moving, you know you just finished watching a bad movie. Well, that's all I have good to say about "Syriana." Unfortunately the screenwriter's (and for this film, director's) success with "Traffic" has led him to believe every story should be told the same way. That sad disease has also afflicted Altman ever since at least "Nashville." You can see the desperate need for us to connect with the characters in all of the non sequitur home life scenes, such as the lawyer's alcoholic father, whose character appears to be in there for no other reason than to emphasize that This Guy is Stressed.

Sadly, despite all of the added time due to these "context" scenes, there is no payoff. The story does not come together, it just ends. The viewer doesn't care about anything that just happened, save maybe Matt Damon's character's (the father of the dead child mentioned above) home life.

Save yourself a couple of hours and skip this wreck.

I was extremely suspicious of the ideas presented in this movie, but being relatively ignorant of quantum physics aside from what I recalled from the excellent "Short History of Nearly Everything" and what I was able to choke down in "A Brief History of Time," it sounded interesting at times. However, the obvious nonsense of the story of the Indians being unable to see the ships of the explorers was ridiculous. I really started questioning what was being shoveler at that point, but then the clincher was the revelation that one of the speakers was actually "channelling" some loony named "Ramtha" completely upset the applecart for me.

What a waste of two hours.

...this was a poor product. Obviously a lot of money was spent on talent, effects, etc., but this finished movie is just a mess. I saw it for free and still feel cheated.

If not for the Bowie songs, I can't say I would have enjoyed this movie at all, and I'm not much of a Bowie fan. Well that,a nd some of the animal antics.

The characters had no depth, the plot had no point (aside from the glaringly obvious personal vindication of a major character for whom I did not care a whit), even the effects--and there were many--seemed to have no point.

Don;t waste your time. 5 out of 10, and that's generous due to the director's history.

This movie was a total waste of time. It caught my interest all of three times: When Sandler saw the car wreck and the harmonium was dropped off, when he landed in Hawaii (I recognized the airport), and when he was attacked the second time.

Other than that, the movie was boring, pointless, and FAR from being the director's best effort. I'm not a big fan of the director anyway, but this was just putrid. I can't understand the glowing reviews, and I am a film fan. I think the ratings are pretty much riding on his reputation, similar to the way Scorsese's have been ever since Goodfellas.

This movie does an excellent job of making the viewer feel he is on a sailing ship. It constantly reminded me of "Das Boot" one of the best film ever made, IMO, in that regard. It was suspenseful, the action scenes were powerful, Crowe's acting was top notch, and you got a feel for the mind of the sailor of the times. That said, it is not a movie that you will reflect on after the closing credits roll, which to me is a sign of a great film.

Spoilers below

I could have done with a lot less of the doctor. It almost felt like I was sitting in an evolution class. Yes, he made a compassionate character, but...we get it. He's enlightened for his time, and he would have put Charles Darwin out of business before Darwin was even born if he had been able to save his specimens. But...so what? Shorten that sucker up and let the film stand on its strengths

SPOILER WARNING

I saw this last night and absolutely loved the first two thirds of it. The ending devolved into a drawn-out mish mash that strayed away from the spirit of Philip K. Dick's writing, but was still satisfying. The first part of the movie did a very good job of sticking within Dick's style of story, common elements of which are: 1) What is reality?, 2) drug use (he had a problem), and 3) who is good/evil?

The more I think about the ending, the more frustrated I become. I have not read the short story upon which this was based, but I would say the point at which we see Anderton lowered into Containment would probably have been Dick's ending. Not only that, it would have come AFTER Max von Sydow's character killed himself and we saw Anderton reunited with his pregnant wife, meaning the "happy" ending was a figment of Anderton's imagination. Tim Blake Nelson's character said something about "all your dreams come true" because of the halo and being in stasis. It's possible that having the warden say that was Spielberg's way of suggesting the end wasn't what we thought. It's also possible Spielberg had it right but later got cold feet when the ending wasn't happy--the closeups of Anderton's face after he was haloed and as he was being lowered into stasis, plus the dream quality of the end sequence of him with his pregnant wife and the pre-cogs on an isolated farm, would fit in to this theory--but they sure seemed to make it clear there was a happy ending.

I highly recommend "Ubik," "Man in the High Castle," and "The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick," which is a five-volume collection of his short stories, to anyone who enjoyed this movie. "Blade Runner," "Total Recall," and "Screamers" are other movies based on Dick stories, but with the exception of "Screamers" (an otherwise bad movie) they so butchered his original story it was virtually unrecognizable.