Requires Subtitles as well as an Extensive Knowledge of the Book

Rating: 4/10 (13 March 2014)

This movie, although in English, we had to watch with English subtitles for three reasons:
1. The dialect spoken at times only vaguely resembles English and it is wholly impossible to understand from start to finish without the actual writing on the screen - I am wondering how the people who saw it in the theater were able to understand it, as I assume they did not have subtitles all the way through.
2. Even with the volume at one-hundred percent, we couldn't hear much of anything. It wasn't the television or speakers, as the volume of the other features on the DVD nearly blew out the speakers at that volume. I don't quite get it - it has to be the "quietest" DVD we've had to date - even the gunfire, car crashes, and so on, were hardly audible. Stranger still, other DVDs are almost too loud at ten percent volume. Are there not any industry standards?
3. The way that the actors spoke throughout was often quite stilted and bizarre as well as most acting as if they were in a short skit on stage rather than a movie - it was as if they were trying as much as possible to speak without opening their mouths (or perhaps it was all the makeup that made it impossible to speak clearly). Very strange. So, even with additional auxiliary DJ speakers connected all you hear is an indecipherable murmur, which is often not in normal English anyway, so you still need subtitles even if you can hear it. Watching a movie with subtitles is certainly not a problem of course - I'm just surprised people have apparently seen it without the subtitles.
The movie is interesting to watch, but without the knowledge of the book, it is mostly a concoction of seemingly unrelated stories, which again, is not a problem, but that was not what was intended. It would have made far more sense as a more even miniseries on television with better integration of the relationships between the different time periods. As it was, I didn't have the slightest clue what was going on with anything at all in the post-apocalyptic story or even the theme or what Halle Berry was looking for or why, or even what actually happened at the end.
I do think it would have worked far better as a "The House That Dripped Blood" style anthology without all the random remote-control switching around. Who wants to watch a movie where someone else is continuously changing the channel, especially between action scenes? What went wrong there?
What was really embarrassing was showing Maori as Africans and yet speaking a dialect of modern Jamaican. Wow, again - what went wrong there? Why are there so many movies made by people who seem to have failed first grade and kept themselves on a desert island ever since, should they accidentally or absentmindedly discover a book with real information? I'm giving it a four out of ten in that it doesn't really deserve a one, but certainly is of far lesser value than the book. To this day, why do people persist in cramming a long, complex novel into a movie? It doesn't work, and again, should have been a miniseries with less of a continuous "channel changing" feeling.