Brilliant

Rating: 9/10 (10 December 2001)

Great film.
If we are to continue to get, what many term 'Hollywood movies', either make them completely realistic, without any innacuracies, or go to the other extreme and make them unrealistic. Namely, go the whole hog, like this, and quite often, like this, it is brilliant.
Don't pussy foot around like Forrest Gump & Sixth Sense do, where half the time you feel you're watching something genuine whilst the other half it's a complete farce.
Yes there's errors & much of this would never occur in real life, but films like this are to entertain the public, which it does. I'd rather have films where one or two scientific facts are ignored, than actual & entire historical occurences being manipulated or reconstructed as you get in crap like Braveheart, The Patriot & even dare I say it #3 Schindlers List.
I dislike an awful lot about America, as I often remark, but realistically if this film concentrated on every country involved in a worldwide battle it would've lasted about 3 days.
People also read too much into the plots of these sort of films. Armageddon and even Tomb Raider the plots are completely incidental. There's basically a lot of fighting, bombing or some sort of action going on, normally to save the world from a villain, darkness, aliens etc & whether it's finding the other half of a coin, blowing up a meteor or anything else I couldn't care less. I never feel a part of the film as we all know how it will end & don't really have any interest in how it comes to that as long as there's some good action.
But this was far better than any of that. It was really easy to feel a part. You could also let your mind wander & visualise what it would be like to be caught up in that sort of thing. The speech by the president was moving, so was the bloke giving his life, especially given recent incidents in the US.
One reviewer complained of there not being enough emphasis on developing characters, but really who cares? Two hours later once the film has ended, it doesn't matter. This was principally a battle by soldiers & scientists to save the world, nothing more, so why spend time finding out what Jeff Goldblum's character was really like away from work?
Of course we'll never see the day a President or leader fights at the front of a battle, but just imagine WE were that leader. I bet we'd all like to think we'd be different & would get involved. So, we can at least hope it may one day happen.
9/10