A Total Disaster

Rating: 1/10 (26 September 2009)

This must be the most overrated film I came across on IMDb yet. If you look at the user rating statistics, you can see that most people voted it 10. Also, can be seen the average rating for male voters is 7.5 (as of the day I write this review). This is clearly a film that is usually more appealing to female viewers, and why is it that if only males voted for this it would still get a great rating, is beyond me.
This film is not only a total atrocity, but an opportunity missed to make a visually beautiful film with great songs and performances.
I have to say I'm a male, but the reasons why I dislike this film is not because of that.
The editing is absolutely terrible. CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT. About 20 minutes in the film I started counting how often is there a cut (which is already a sign that I waited for the film to be over). There is a cut every 2-3 seconds in average. You barely can follow what is going on. You just see faces pop up on the screen. There is even a scene where you see the building of the Moulin Rouge for a second. It just pops up, you don't know why. That shows that the whole editing of this film is a mess. The director employed this quick editing for the movie to be stylish, but it just failed.
The acting and the character development are disastrous. Nicole Kidman looks gorgeous as always, but that's it. Both her's and McGregor's acting is extremely forced and unnatural. Also, I don't see why I should care about the characters, if the director doesn't care about developing them. What we know about the two main characters is that they LOVE each other. Everything else is unimportant. The creators thought that the love and chemistry between McGregor's and Kidman's character will be so strong and powerful that it will blow us away, and then they can do ANYTHING on screen we won't notice. NO. You don't care if a plane crashes in the Moulin Rouge, and all the characters die, because you don't care about them.
The visual style. A huge fail again. The whole thing tries to have it's own unique and beautiful visual style, but it just isn't impressing at all. The whole film seems like it's on a set, and maybe that was intentional, but in doesn't work anyway.
Ridiculously clichéd dialogues and story. The word LOVE is used in every sentence, there are monologues about LOVE, Ewan McGregor is a troubled writer who LOVEd someone, and writes a story about LOVE, and the whole film is about LOVE, ....... NO, enough!
The interesting thing is that all the points cited above have one thing in common (apart form that they are all negative). The quick cut-cut-cut editing, the forced and cheesy acting, the wanna look cool visual style, the 'they've done this story a hundred times before but I'll show that I'll do it the best' comes down to this: the director wants us to believe that this is great by those things. It wants to shows that this is a unique and powerful film. No, it's not. It's a bad bad bad film. Of course, it's got to be said that this is a musical, and you can still like the songs. If that is the case buy the soundtrack, but don't waste your time watching this atrocity. And the fact that it won 2 Oscars, shows the true quality of these awards.