Beautiful but empty

Rating: 2/10 (5 September 2003)

The five-word summary: Visually spectacular self-indulgent claptrap. I understand that the book is very good, but standing by itself this movie is absolutely and utterly meaningless. The entire "plot", such as it is, could be described in six sentences or less. The visual imagery is stunning, but towards the end gets extremely repetitive. The music is beautiful, but the sound-effects are absolutely diabolical - at points it seems as if there are less than ten separate sound effects used in the entire movie, repeated ad-nauseum.
It defies belief that this movie is so well-rated on IMDB. I can only draw two conclusions - either the book is great, and people are willing to forgive the fact that this movie cannot stand in its own right for anybody who's not read the book first, or people vote this movie up because they want to feel clever and believe they found some hidden meaning in a movie that basically has none.