Unbearable Saccharine Schlock

Rating: 1/10 (12 January 2008)

Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (1996) shows us that Hollywood was capable beautiful pieces of art even before they started re-making classics circa 2000. Rather than refer to the director or the cast as separate entities, I would rather refer to them as a hideous amorphous blob known as "krug103", because as we all know, dehumanizing people is the best way to get them to shut up.
Based on (plot-wise) the mind-shattering post-modern poetic novel by Michael Ondaantje, the heart and soul of the author's work is raped and humiliated by the big screen until it cries for death. What we get, instead of a character study of deeply insightful, 10-dimensional characters, is a romanticized dick-fest of Ralph Fiennes and what's-her-face(whoever played The English Patient's love interest) hamming up the screen with their unimportant love story.
Some may consider it bad form to not even attempt to figure out the whore's name, but people who focus on the Patient and his affair, such as the director, are morons who completely missed the point of the novel. Another mistake the director made was turning Hana, Kip, and Caravaggio into 1-dimensional characters with absolutely no purpose in the movie but to listen to The Patient's story and make puppy-dog faces.
One would assume that after reading the poetic verses, and fully absorbing the bleak outlook of the novel, that the atmosphere would easily come to a creative director who would translate the dead atmosphere of the book to a visual journey into the psyches of those affected by the war, but instead we get a myopic excuse for a film that seems like the director had a creative writing class in high school taught by a complete idiot who photo-copies digest magazines in his spare time between marking perfects on assignments of people who he favours and watching lame sci-fi shows.
The utter carelessness and lack of attention towards the main themes of the novel, and the failure to present the deep characters and glorious atmosphere of the novel is so anger-inducing that i'm barely able to write a coherent review. It makes me reminisce about a creative writing teacher who would probably go to this movie and enjoy every moment of it because of its ability to adhere to the "10 steps to directing a good movie" crap that the establishment tries to feed people because they're too damn dumb to think beyond affairs, love and romance.
If I could rate this lower than a 1 I'd probably go into imaginary numbers or decimals. Avoid at all costs.