Very beautiful but the violence didn't help the movie in any way.

Rating: 7/10 (3 July 2007)

This movie was an interesting experience. The camera-work is gorgeous, the effects very nice, good acting too. I mean it. But the movie has some REALLY serious flaws too, no question about it. A movie about fantasy in a way misses its point when it makes you think of computer animations and latex puppets. The story has to be grounded in primarily in the viewers *emotions* not in the senses that reaches ear and eye. In the first Star Wars movies the effects was great at the time but it was the saga, the tale that made one keep thinking about it for weeks after leaving the cinema. That wont happen with this film even if it is quite good. Visuals cant alone create that, and it shouldn't, a audience that confuse surface with deep, lay ground to an empty shallow and scary cultural scenario.
Also and more importantly...the intensity of the depicted violence can never replace the overall intensity of the movie experience. I think everybody somewhere know that that is a very very cheap trick. Still the monkey in man begin to clap hands when seeing the violence in sin city or 300, just for the sake of violence. The problem with the visual torture in this movie was that it felt so unnecessary. Sometimes violence can improve a movie, like in Shindlers list, (but if that movie had been a gore-movie like "Passion of the Christ", it would have teased our disgust more than our hearts. The jackass guys can disgust us, but they cant touch our deeper feelings because that takes intelligence and very hard artistic work.) Maybe the whole point with the gore in this film was to make people like me complain about it. Of course it will work, the day it wont, the world will be even worse than now. I know people that has been tortured in war, and don't find the idea of people watch the fiction of that as nice entertainment while eating popcorn very inspiring, or even as a good cultural sign. It should be easy to make the tale more adult without just adding violence, i mean, why not more complexity or depth instead? The movie was a good one anyway, but it could have been a true masterpiece if it had touched us even deeper with its storyline. See it yourself and get your own opinion.
I rate it 6.5 of 10.