Reviews

... hint: If you not a pre-teen kid, as mine are, you may not enjoy this so much - but hey, guess what, this movie isn't aimed at you. Move along!

But I loved it. And I'm a grump old dad - and movie fan!

The story is a kind of coming-of-age, fantasy tech story that isn't aiming to be taken seriously but the director's keen eye for lighting, comedy and teen-drama, centred on the moralities of of the Instagram Age are all well observed as is the cast, song-choices and musical and athletic performances from the lead (Ross Lynch) - who I'd never seen before. He was was totally convincing, funny, charming and with athletic skills that left my boy applauding out loud and my daughter swooning for more.

You could critique it, if you have to, and say it's not so 'original' but give me 'good' over 'original' all day long. Oliva Holt was lovely as the muse too. TBO the movie was great from start to finish and I've spent a lot more time and money watching movies with budgets that would have dwarfed this and not enjoyed them half as much. Watch it!

... The show had some great footage that's relatively hard to find in a shorter well-balanced review of content and theories developed by the likes of Graham Hancock and Michael Cremo and similar. Ideal for anyone who hadn't heard some of these theories before and wants to hear and see the authors expound their theories while showing the actual evidence on the show. Whether you like the theories or not is up to you but the quality, pacing and presentation of the material is all good albeit not in HD.

It would be entirely churlish not give this superb production 10 stars out of 10. What more could a director do to make this less perfect? Particular credit must go to Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon for bringing this compelling, exciting and sensitive story into production but even more so for getting director Jean- Marc Vallée on board. And boy what a beautiful, sensitive, funny and dramatic story he's manage to render here - and with such style too. To cap it off the director has managed to extract career-best performances not just from Nicole Kidman, which should deserve credit enough all on it's own - but Reese Witherspoon, Laura Stern and the excellent Shailene Woodley all put in career-best performances - perhaps reflecting the quality of the writing, song choices, editing and filmography.

Interesting enough IMDb user-rating system rates this their 129th top rated TV show - which compelled me incredulously to see exactly which dramas fell above it. Let's just say that I couldn't agree with at least 99% of them. For me this is easily be in the top ten and certainly the top twenty TV shows/dramas ever made.

I enjoyed this movie. It has some great jumpy moments at the beginning to pull you into this movie's orbital trajectory.

But to enjoy this movie you do have to suspend your essential disbelief that America and a consortium of other product placement regions, sorry I mean Russia, China and Japan, could spend "well over $200bn" putting a science station in orbit and then man it (or should that be "woman it") with half of a dozen of their most stupid scientists (convincingly played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds and Rebecca Ferguson). ;-)

If you can do that, you'll love it and even find some of it funny.

And if you've never seen Alien (1979) or Gravity (2013) before you might even find the plot line highly original too. ;-)