A boring and very violent film with no discernible message

Rating: 1/10 (5 November 2006)

I just saw this film and found it rather boring. The plot seems to make no sense at all, we are never told why the hero is embarking on this rather futile journey, and the film is full of pointless moralising about the horrors of the futuristic society it depicts. There are numerous heavy-handed didactic visual references to contemporary political issues - the Iraq war, refugees, police brutality, Guantanamo bay, Abu Ghraib that have nothing to do with the plot and are rather irritating. The characters seem totally unbelievable - one-dimensional cut-out figures with no plausible personality. The film is also full of the kind of senseless and gory blow-them-away violence that characterises so many empty-headed American action films nowadays, except it is even more objectionable here as this film obviously has pretensions to be a serious product. I haven't read the original book, so I am unable to determine if these flaws are in the book, or are the result of the highly didactic objectives of the director. Either way, this must be one of the worst films I have seen for the past several years - boring, irritating and entirely vacuous.