Reviews

And like (no, wait, unlike?) any whodunit, everyone is the culprit. Ed Wood may be the most famous and revered bad filmmaker, but at least he was polite enough to make us laugh. Not so here. In his prime, Hitchcock called actors 'walking coathangers,' but that's a kindness in this tar-pit of spectacular incompetence. Ben Kingsley belongs in the Monty Python hospital for over-actors; Henry Cavill makes Jane Goodall's gorillas look shakesperean by comparison; Alexandra wotserface would be better off as an ice sculpture at a Los Angeles armenian wedding; the man who plays the twins is likely stupider than the brain-damaged twin he plays; Stanley Tucci does a serviceable impression of cartoon robot with a megaphone where his mouth should be; Minka Kelly just has to show up to be incandescent, and she got away with such a tiny part no-one will remember the surrounding shame; Ben Kingsley's pseudo kid does OK, but it scarcely matters in this sargasso sea of imbeciles. How did none of the adults run screaming mid-shoot once the dailies began to pile up? They're narcicisstic infants, that's why. When we chuck all the Trumpies - of all genders, ages, creeds and nationalities - into the ravenous mouth of Mount Aetna, everyone involved in this dismal, tragic debacle should go with. I could go on, but...naah.

Poor, desperate people of any age on any continent do NOT burn large quantities of cash. EVER. To think otherwise is never to have known true poverty. The cabal responsible for films like this isn't just cynical, self-serving and mean-spirited: as individuals, their separation from the rest of us makes them, at best, delusional, at worst, psychotic.

You're hiding children from an evil organization with functionally limitless resources. The consequence of failure is death. But a hormonal teen is a. Allowed to keep her phone and b. Allowed to call when and wherever she likes.

REALLY?!?!!??

No, not the movie plot. That's a 4-year old's crayon drawing during a tantrum. Nor the plot holes. Those are singularity-sized voids that CERN physicists would have a whale of a time exploring. The self-fulfilling point, in a turn of drunken, fragile logic worthy of the simpletons responsible for this insane waste of money and resources - enough to keep many thousands of poverty-stricken unfortunates alive, besides - is this: morons try to save the world with time-travel in their arsenal; complicate the problem while finding an absurdly easy solution, but manage only to prove to the audience that humanity isn't worth saving as long as it consists of the kind of feral chimps who thought this up. A pestilence on all these entitled circle jerks.

But really there are things that transcend suspension of disbelief. Adult career criminals, hunted by killers with essentially unlimited resources allow a moody, petulant teen access to a phone and an iPad (?) whilst running for their lives.

Come on. Do better.

You have to wonder how a large group of professionals can understand the minutiae of their craft from the perspective of production and presentation while displaying less than a chimpanzee's understanding of plot, logic, suspension of disbelief, motivation (and the list goes on.) It isn't just that they force their characters to miss the obvious, as others have pointed out, like the flowers in the vase ( "I'm also not a mean-spirited arsehole like you, so I will smile and make small talk with the pretty nurse etc. etc.")

For people who live their lives bathed in intrigue, they appear to be clueless about almost everything around them. A mole? a mole? we have a mole? HOW?And then there are the 'plot drivers' (tongue firmly in cheek.) If the plague hit 'prime' in 93ish, a few decades after the portal opened, then by DEFINITION both worlds would be affected because influenza is infectious long before its symptoms, and, in fact, stops being infectious once symptoms appear. And, clearly, if it has passed, that's only because the rest of our immune systems have defended us - making dystopian paranoia pointless.

Forget it - I won't continue listing the idiocies. Resentment is fabricated, motivations are absurd, scenes are set for their tactical dramatic value without any real context.

Like so much material in the 21st Century, they thought they had a cute concept without ever thinking it through. I agree with so many of these negative reviews that harp on how slow it is; slow tempos are the Barnum & Bailey version of gravitas (and why people crave the latter always escapes me,) or the cynical screenwriter's way of stretching 8 minutes of plot into an entire episode.

I think they must be college-educated simpletons who buried themselves in Pope, Donne and Milton (and not Derrida, Eagleton, Lacan and Kristeva) eager to use not-so-distant, not-so-difficult metaphor to explain the meaning of self; they seem to have succeeded only in shining a light on how clueless they are about people.

So you get taken in by some gripping corporate-thriller, which, in itself, is well made enough and intelligent enough that the unoriginal Davida vs. Goliath plot line doesn't bug you, that you hope (even as a lefty) it won't be some childish "big bad demons run evil company" scenario, and it turns out it both is and isn't that. Forgiving the relatively useless and overwrought melodramatic subplots involving little kids and their adverse reaction to loss (boring, pointless, and all too common,) you stick through the thing for the grand reveal.

Oy Vey.

Imagine a giant pharma concern has killed 20+ children on a single, isolated site in a relatively short time: despite more or less unlimited resources, they leave the skeletons of a score of children in the the ground, on site. Leaving aside the obvious reality (they have the resources to just remove them all under cover of night and dump them far into the ocean,) how could they possibly NOT do this after 3 separate sets of unconnected people show interest in the land and the case? Why wait for evidence to be found?

I wouldn't bother with this if the rest of the writing weren't at least competent. But wouldn't a man with De Facto limitless resources use them to make it all go away?

but through season 2, i am having a hard time reconciling a number of things... a spectacularly attractive geek is rare enough, but killing the redhead was shock enough.

How does someone who drives a Maserati 4000 straight 6 twin spark switch to a modern convertible??

This programme hearkens back to the French "Arsene Lupin," even though Valentin doesn't Robin Hood money to the poor.

But anyone who would drive Maserati 4000 ('66-'68?) would, literally out of philosophical stubbornness, despise a modern, expensive car.

otherwise, it's fab.

I disliked this film when it was first aired for a catalogue of reasons too long to enumerate. I am happy to note that at least 10% of the negative reviews (those I've skimmed) have covered the majority of the annoying/infuriating deficiencies therein.

As a convinced Atheist and lifelong lefty (complete with schisms such as support for nuclear power and conscription,) I have found myself repeatedly crestfallen when faced with the reality that the writers/producers/stars of this dreck seem hell-bent on representing me (and those like me) and my views in fiction. The closest analogy I can think of, tipsy on a Saturday night, is a Bosch painting pretending to be 20th century photo-realism.

So I come to the punch line: during my second run (ongoing) I noticed Jodie Foster's line (paraphrased) "He (my father) died when I was nine." Later, faced with the John Hurt character's incredibly pointless video-backed biography, we see her birth date as August 1964 and her father's death as November 1974. She was 10.

So an army of gophers making a movie about science can't add & subtract tiny numbers.

So much for Ivy League brains and associated superiority complexes.