victims of their own success, i guess

Rating: 1/10 (8 November 2013)

This happens all the time. Someone strikes it rich and makes a big hit, and then forever after, everybody acts like they're geniuses and gives them carte blanche, expecting more hits.
This might have been a decent movie if:
1. They'd cut least an hour out. At least. WAY WAY too much everything.
2. They'd eliminated the flash-forwards (or whatever they were) from the opening, and jumped straight into some coherent narrative. Does every film need to feed us a preview of the climax to convince us to pay attention to that pesky exposition? Can we treat viewers like someone with an attention span?
3. They'd used subtitles for the "After The Fall" section. Or made characters speak normal English. I understood about 10% of what Halle Berry and Tom Hanks said.
4. They'd used different actors for different roles. Sorry, but this thing of using the same actor for different roles just made it confusing. The makeup was distracting and silly.
5. They'd constructed the story the way it was in the book. All this jumping around from one storyline to another is so overused. It screams of lazy writing. Especially the creation of "matching" climaxes. Yawn.
There's also a lot of good stuff going on too, but I'm still going with one star cuz 1) the source material was so fantastic and they really made a mess of it, and 2) this was an incredibly talented group of people with plenty of money and time to do it right. Very disappointed.