Spectacular story, incredible effects, and strong performances.

Rating: 10/10 (25 December 2008)

I find it hard not to draw comparisons to "Forest Gump" after seeing this film. As a play, it would have been nice. If it had been made 20 years ago, it would have been forgotten by now. The fact that visual effects are what they are now will make this film an academy award winner that will resonate for decades.
I remember the way I felt when I first saw Gollum in "Fellowship of the Ring". I couldn't believe what I was seeing. The combination of motion capture and computer animation had made a real creature, but one far enough from human that it was still a bridge between something human and something cartoonish.
Artists say that the hardest thing to paint or draw is a human face, because any flaw will be immediately spotted by anyone. We are so in tune to the human face, movies that have attempted to duplicate it have, up until now, fallen flat.
When we see Brad Pitt in his late eighties acting boyish in this film, it is 100% genuine and believable. When Pitt is 19, he is just as believable. The effects are as ground breaking in this film as the dinosaurs in Jurassic park or the bullet-time slow-mo shots of The Matrix.
Now that I'm through going on about the visual effects, I have to say that the film does something amazing on an emotional level. It screams something to us we don't even want to whisper to ourselves in private: You're getting older! We've watched people grow old in films before, but we never believed it. We see people around us grow old, but we have time to adjust. We look around at pretty people and realize they are too young for us. We see our parents having trouble walking and hear about their medical problems, but we don't see it as unusual.
Watching an otherwise ordinary man grow younger is jarring. Believing what we're seeing makes it emotional. Ill never be the same after seeing a baby die of old age. The movie tagline is true. Life is measured in moments, not minutes.