terrible disappointment

Rating: 3/10 (6 October 2000)

I consider this film infinitely worse than "Eraserhead" or "Brazil" and slightly better than "The Blair Witch Project". Pretentious, shallow, pointless, its pseudoscience was laughable and the shock scenes mostly too. I do love conspiracy theories and the mystique of numbers, but instead of watching this film, I would rather read the book "The Bible Code" or selected stories of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino and Arthur C. Clarke ("The Nine Billion Names of God"). I would also like to point out (is it just a coincidence?) the case of a blind boy in a recent Iranian film "Color of Paradise". Trained in Braille's writing system for the blind, in which letters are represented by a pattern of bumps, the boy "read" wheat in the field and grains of sand on the beach. Of course, "Color of Paradise" belongs to a completely different genre category, but one cannot escape the conclusion that it conveys the mystique underlying the real world in a beautiful, poetic and empathic manner, ultimately much more effectively than the "Pi".