Where is psychology? Where is the subtelty? Where is originality?..

Rating: Null/10 (6 March 2004)

Isn't anyone tired of all this Hollywood glossiness and soppy melodrama??? This movie almost made me sick with all those "oh-so-Hollywood" overly loud weeping music on the background of the fighting scenes (it is supposed to tell the very stupid viewer of the film how he is supposed to feel about this fighting - but for God's sake, don't make it this obvious!! + the viewer is not that stupid..); with all those cliches (white dove in the church and oh so many others); with its predictability (why, why wasn't Jude Law killed right in the middle of the film?? - it would have perhaps made it a bit more interesting..) etc. The choice of music was terrible - over-dramatic and too loud!!(at the beginning, over the battle scene), just not subtle enough, so grotesquely Hollywood. The whole film prefers to chew things for you, assuming that you are not intelligent or sensitive enough to get the meaning of the scenes WITHOUT all those means. This film perhaps could have been turned into something worth watching, with the given script (even though the script has quite a few holes as well, and the relationship between Ada and Inman is not started off properly and not believable), if it was not for this style of directing. It could have avoided all the glossiness and been a bit more realistic (the sex scene between Kidman and Law, for example - why couldn't they make it simple and naturalistic rather than this pornographic glossy Hollywood style - does that happen in real life??) Where is psychology? Where is the subtelty? Where is originality?.. Nevertheless, the film had also some good things about them, if you turn a blind eye on all the above. It made me think about how in the war relationships between people are so much more intense and rapid; how people who have been through this experience know what really matters in life; how they value so much more their lives and the people around them; and what an unnatural and silly in its cruelty thing is the war. The violence in the film also works well. 5 out of 10.