Could have been great

Rating: 8/10 (17 December 2007)

I would definitely recommend this movie but I just wish it had not been dummed down to just an action movie. The best things about it were Will Smith's acting, that really carried the whole movie, and the amazing sets. Thats more than enough to make it a good movie. What was missing to make it great was any kind of depth to the story. In the book you start off thinking you know who the bad guys are but when faced with what is actually happening you are not so sure. Kind of like in the Strugatsky brothers' books where the line between good and evil is never quite clear. This whole aspect was skimmed over in the movie. I guess this was to make it more accessible to the general movie-going public or some such idiotic notion. The other real let down was the creatures. You'd think Hollywood with their budget could have improved on what we can produce in games. The creatures looked like standard Maya or Character Studio characters that had been touched up and animated with motion capture. The sets were so amazingly well done that the creatures looked cheap in comparison. Just need to work back from facial recognition, sprinkle in some animated texture-maps, add a pinch of realistic lighting, simplify the physics, convolve the whole lot with the light-scattering functions and voila! pretty close to real. Oh well, another ten years I guess.