Reviews

I absolutely get that this is an adaption of an old anime series, and thus you can't just go and change everything.

May contain spoilers, because of nuts.

I can also cope with unrealistic technology, spaceships doing battle over only several hundred meters distance but travelling 158000 light years, spacecraft braking and turning with what must be 1000ands of Gs. Of course nobody is wearing spacesuits during battle or even sits down in crash couches, instead they run around and need to put on glasses when the main gun fires.

What I really hate is when, for no reason at all, some guy that clearly can't delegate, constantly abandons his post to play firefighter, apparently is happier in the cockpit of a fighter craft, micromanages, and never even read the manual gets promoted "acting captain" of a battleship. Starting an affair with a subordinate while the ship is doing a hyper-jump doesn't help..

Speaking of Jumps, why aren't they going to battle-stations before they jump when they know there can be surprises at the other end? So, after being acting captain for bit, the acting captain leaves ship for leading some fighter attack. After which he lands to shoot a bit with assault guns and has to be persuaded to go back to his ship.

To sum up the whole movie: Highly illogical.

Sadly, nobody ever saw the Rising Seas Shoreline Maps from National Geographic (On which IMDb doesn't let me link) Or the calculation on how much the ocean level can rise until there just is not enough water on the planet. Hint: It's 80 metres. That would kill Rome, but not its hills, and certainly not Dresden (at 114 metres), which still would be 1000 kilometres away from any ocean.

But then, this is not about science and the possible. It's Indiana Jones meets Waterworld, and very bad piping. Since if you don't use Moses sceptre to drain the oceans (to where?) every few thousand years, the oceans will just keep rising. Probably fits right into the narrative of climate-change deniers.

In any case, I did not find the acting too bad, neither the dialogue. It's just the plot that is so incredibly unbelievable. Apart from that, the most annoying thing was the outro music.

It starts out nicely, but deteriorates into home alone. I had expected more conflict within the family, and more overcoming of obstacles resulting from the test itself, for instance the precarious water situation. Instead, some relative turns up to simulate an external threat, resulting in the family going "home alone". The TV team showing up is also rather dragged in by the head and shoulders, even if they're quite self-ironic.

And of course, there's the religious propaganda, insinuating you should feel bad for not going to church, and the intellectual property propaganda comparing copyright infringement to theft.

I'm European, and we've got our own share of huge breweries swamping the market with tasteless pils. But it's not as bad as it is in the US.

The point is, there is NOTHING about the issue to pretend to be objective. There's beer, and there's that dishwater those huge breweries are trying to sell you as beer.

Of course the huge breweries are successful. But success in the market does not mean a better product. McDonalds, Microsoft and Britney Spears all prove the same point: Given good enough marketing, a bit of lobbying and market leverage, you can sell trash.

And of course, the bigger your market share gets, the lower the expectations need to be. Lowest common denominator. And they're not the least innovative; but if they're realizing someone else put a product out there the people like, they try to occupy that niche as well; if they can. That Anheuser-Busch is now producing beer (sometimes not under their own brand) which even might qualify as beer, is only because they've got competition who started it. Without the competition of those small breweries, there would be only Bud Light, Coors Light and Millers Light -- which of course taste all alike. The new sovjet planned economy: You can choose between three products now, but they're all the same.

I think some people here commenting on IMDb about "Bias" are actually astroturfing for some of those three huge breweries. Either that, or they genuinely don't know how good beer tastes.

First off, I'm not a firefighter, but I'm in some kind of para-firefighting unit (the guys who get called if an earthquake hits and the real firefighters need more people for SAR), so I had some training and simulation but I have no real-life experience.

But still, there are some points one notices as totally unbelievable. I can understand that they removed the mouth/nose-pieces of the masks and that there is not enough smoke, because the public would otherwise see nothing. But some things defy logic:

• No second mask attached to the oxygen. How the hell do you want to rescue people trough the smoke without one?

• Rappelling people. No, it's not done like that. I'd be screaming too if somebody hitched a rope around me in that fashion and hung me from a building. If I could scream, that is, and not pass out from want of air because the rope squeezes my lungs. The second time when they're abseiling Jack it's better but still weird.

• "Aim high". No, you bloody don't. You always fight fire from as low as possible. You don't fight want to sprinkle flames, you'll want to extinguish the fire, and that's below the flames.

• No discipline. They're running around like chicken. And they shout all the time, instead of using radio, and keeping discipline.

• No tactics. Why don't they work in teams of at least two? You still can get separated, but it takes much more than if everyone just scurries around alone in search for victims.

• Do they really enter buildings without bringing water? I Europe, firefighters would never enter a burning building without.

• Firefighters on the roof. WTF do they think they're doing there without security lines or water? - Exploding rooms. Wood and brick does not "explode suddenly".

The better points are actually camaraderie and the other non-firefighting parts of the movie. It's a lot of kitsch, but that's alright. I'll give it a point for this.

Well, the problem with this is, that some things are only funny if you're living in a prohibitive society. That's also why europeans don't think "American Pie" is terribly funny. "Half Baked" has the same problem. It's just not so much fun to watch people act funny in public, because they don't want anybody to know they're smoking pot, while here most probably everyone will tell you freely (if) he's smoking pot -- it's just not a big deal. The first maybe 30 minutes are quite Ok, but then it started getting painful to watch. So I'd give this the label "not suited for non-US citizens".

I couldn't actually watch it, because after an actually nice intro, they started throwing around technical phrases in no coherent fashion. Just total bogus, nonsense. If meaningless technobabble is used in Star Trek, I can understand that. But using real-world technical terms in a completely wrong way is something to get technicians to scream and beg to stop.