Shaggy Dog plus Deux Ex Machina plus Narration equals Bad Movie

Rating: 3/10 (3 July 2005)

The Good: Character interaction very believable. The Bad: Wacky ending. The Ugly: The overall story telling.
In this movie, Spielberg made three major and common film making mistakes. Shaggy Dog, Deus ex Machina, and the use of a Narrator.
The film is a shaggy dog story. A shaggy Dog story builds, and builds, and builds to a climax, but the climax has nothing to do with how the story (protagonist vs. antagonist) ultimately resolves, nor does it inspire any visible change in the protagonist. For example, the protagonist does something monumentally spectacular toward the end, but afterwards, doesn't seem impacted by the climax at all.
The second problem is Deus ex machina. The term refers to an ancient literary tactic. When the characters and plot don't resolve, a 'god' character... (in this case, nature) appears on the stage out of nowhere to resolve the plot. So, if the characters and their story had nothing to do with how the plot resolves, why did we have to sit through a story about the characters?
Finally, Narration. The movie starts and ends with narration. A film maker can use plot, characters, audio, video to tell a story. If the film maker must resort to using a narrator to 'explain' the story to the audience, that's bad film making.
So the movie makes three major story telling blunders: A useless build up, a plot resolution that comes out of nowhere, and a voice over. That's really bad. No one should ever think this is a good movie, except in one case: It should be the perfect movie to test out your new wide screen panel monitor and surround sound system... but that's about it.