Damned near perfect.

Rating: 10/10 (18 February 2000)

My only gripe is the product placement gag, intended to be surreal, but in fact prosaic - as well as silly. Surely the evil genius behind The Truman Show would have come up with a more creative source of funding...?
But we're talking about, what, thirty seconds of footage? Apart from this `The Truman Show' is a film so finely crafted it sings. Lovely to look at and intelligent as well. One of the two peaks of science fiction cinema of the 1990s (the other was `Twelve Monkeys'), but this rather understates the case. Jim Carrey was inspired casting. I don't care whether he's technically speaking a good actor or not - he might as well be, since he's perfect as the hothouse-produced Truman Burbank, who doesn't know he's performing in front of a huge audience but who's unconsciously adopted one or two mannerisms of someone who does.
Amazingly, some critics have complained about the end, motivated, perhaps, by the vague feeling that no symphony should ever end on a sweet major chord. Honestly! Some people wouldn't know a good story if it fell out of the sky and hit them. The entire film was concerned with the inside of Truman's dome. We were told, of course, that there was an outside world, as there must be, and we even saw bits of it - but only those bits that were directly connected to the inside of the dome. When Truman finally, after a GOOD story, dammit, emerges from his egg, the story simply must end: there's no other way to end it. I hope all those people who wanted to know how Truman will cope with the outside world get their wish. I hope there's a twee, tiresome, mind-numbingly tedious sequel which tells you everything you want to know. Serve you right. You can watch that; I'll watch the breathtaking original again.