The Emperor's New Clothes

Rating: 1/10 (20 January 2005)

The Emperor's New Clothes is a Hans Christian Anderson fable about tailors who convince everyone that only a fool wouldn't be able to see the suit they make for the Emperor. One small boy has the guts to speak out that there is no suit, the Emperor is naked. This sums up this film perfectly: A-list stars, A-list Director, A-list budget = fabulous outfit, but there's nothing there. It is a con.
The Problem: the actors behave as if it's a talent show to be the best impressionist, thus focus on themselves resulting in an inability to accommodate interaction with other actors. The characters are separate, exaggerated caricatures of memories. The only actors to mimic effectively and have awareness of others were Jude Law and Kate Beckinsale, who gave connected performances. Watching Di Caprio manically overtly acting a tortured soul, who was upstaged by the make-up department, was not only soullessly stupid to watch, but embarrassing for him because he thinks he is being different from his usual roles. He had not built any humanity into the previous scenes, hence there was nothing for the audience to grasp and care about when he was ill. His performance makes Russell Crowe look like a genius in Beautiful Mind and Martin Scorsese's directing makes Ron Howard look like the master of biopics. This film is a completely disjointed, arrogant, pretentious pile of meaningless images with no depth, understanding, feeling, narrative direction, believability, nor entertainment value. Knowledge and interest in aeroplane technology did not help me like this film, because it did not show any passion or insight into this subject matter! The film is so boring it hurts.
Question: why is this film nominated for 14 Oscars? My Rating: 1/10. The worst three hours incarcerated in a cinema ever. I was boiling with anger at being conned into watching such rubbish. Of the thousands of films I have seen (of all Nationalities and eras), this was the worst at all levels. The interesting musical score was the only reason I sometimes stayed awake.
Why see this film: because you are in love Leo Di Caprio and Martin Scorsese, or because you can see the Emperor's New Clothes.