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user\n... mainly because Ju-on 2 boasts an outrageous FORTY minutes' worth of material literally taken straight out of the first Ju-on - and when you consider that the sequel only runs for 76 minutes, that leaves you with 36 original minutes' worth of film. Ho-hum. I found that deeply irritating - as if viewers simply wouldn't remember the same stuff! - not to mention dull, having to watch it all over again.
OK, that complaint aside, the byline for Ju-on 2 was that it was supposed to explain a lot of the unanswered questions from the first movie, which frankly, over 36 minutes, simply doesn't go far enough to making any kind of sense of the original's highly convoluted storyline.
There are, however, some really nice new horror sequences which show how good the film might have been, had it had some time to develop; and some of the questions raised by the original - some, but not all - are answered.
So in conclusion - if you loved the first original movie and want to see some further developments on the story, go for it - but just remember to keep your remote control to hand with your finger on the fast-forward button for forty minutes.
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user\nPOPEYE AND BIG FOOT **; POPEYE'S ENGINE COMPANY **; GETTING POPEYE'S GOAT **1/2
I used to lap these up as a kid but, catching an episode of the series comprising three cartoons back-to-back now i.e. several years later (they preceded the theatrical screening of the pirate yarn RAIDERS OF THE SEVEN SEAS [1953]), I can see how they don't hold up all that well! The character of Popeye isn't exactly sympathetic to begin with, Olive Oyl distinctly overbearing and Bluto's antics failed to elicit much interest either  in short, the scripts were alarmingly thin, fairly awful and generally unfunny to boot. They're strictly juvenile fare, yet I doubt today's kids would even have the patience to stick with them!; furthermore, the animation style is unattractive.
Taking each short per se, I guess they improved from one to the other: after the initial shock, one adapted to its mediocre quality as it were, so that the third cartoon easily results in being the most enjoyable of the lot  Popeye is entrusted with a mascot army goat whose immense appetite causes him no end of mischief (hardly original, I know, but always an amusing ploy). One interesting element here was that the shorts were bookended with Popeye delivering moralistic bits of wisdom to the kids in the audience.
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user\nHanna-Barbera sucks the life out of another famous property. The violence is watered down, the stories are formulaic, the animation is bad, the music is obnoxious and repetitive, and frankly, the show just isn't funny.
At the time, H-B put every one of its series through the same clichéd situations, regardless if it fit the world of the cartoon or not. Thus, Popeye and Bluto appear in a recurring segment as cavemen (\"Hey! Popeye is popular, and the Flinstones are popular. Put 'em together, and you can't miss!\"). Also, in an apparent ripoff of \"Private Benjamin,\" Olive Oyl and the Goon have a regular segment that features them as new army recruits. Seriously! Why?
Adding to the annoyance factor are the public service announcements in every episode (standard practice at the time for cartoons, but still annoying). Popeye lectures his nephews on crossing the street safely, recycling, and - are you ready for this? - the dangers of smoking! (I swear I'm not making that up.)
The only charm remaining from the original cartoons is that Jack Mercer, the voice of Popeye from the early days, continues the role here.
Worth checking out once just to get a new appreciation for the old Fleischer shorts. Otherwise, avoid at all costs.
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user\nAnother great movie by Costa-Gavras. It's a great presentation of the situation is Latin America and the US involvement in Latin American politics. The facts might or might not be accurate but it is a fact that the US was deeply involved in coups and support of Latin American dictatorships.
Despite this though the spirit of the movie follows the typical leftist/communist propaganda of the Cold War era. Costa-Gavras is a well-known communist sympathizer and his movies are always biased. For example he presents the US actions as brutal and inhumane, while representing Tupamaros' extremist activities as something positive.
As it turned out it was a blessing for Uruguay and the rest of the Latin America that the US got involved. Europe is filled with poor East European prostitutes. I never heard of poor Uruguayan or Chilean girls prostituting themselves en masse as it happens in most East European countries. The US was fighting a dirty war and god bless us all the monster of Soviet Communism was defeated. It is unfortunate the US had to do what it did in Latin America (and elsewhere) but sometimes you need to play dirty. This is not an idealistic world as Costa-Gavras and Matamoros like to believe. Had Matamoros come to power in Uruguay, we would've had another Ukraine in Latin America.
All in all this movie follows corrupt and bankrupt leftist ideology of times past and tries to pass it as idealistic and morally correct.
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user\nI think Phillip Kaufman read the cliff's Notes version of the Kundera novel and then set about making this film. Okay, of course it won't have the punch of the original. Kundera's novels are great because of his manipulation of the narrative concept, his ability to step in and out of stories he constructs. This film does not even try! The one dream sequence of Tereza's, so vital to the atmosphere of the book, is reworked and makes no sense whatsoever. Also, and this is perhaps a lesser point, Daniel Day-Lewis looks a lot like Ben Stiller in this (I know it's not really a valid complaint, but hey). A perfect example of the Hollywood-izing of otherwise fine literature.
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user\nAfter reading the book, which had a lot of meaning for me, the movie didn't give me any of the feeling which the book conveyed. This makes me wonder if Kaufman even liked this book for he successfully made it into something else.Either that or he is simply bad. Most importantly where is the lightness?! From the very first scene, music drownes out most of the dialogue and feeling, and this continues right through the movie. I think the makers thought that by having upbeat music playing right through the movie, this would make the story feel light- however they have completely failed here. Instead the music manages to give everything that 'movie feel', in a way dramatising events so that we linger on them, so that everything actually feels heavy.
Another example of the how this adaptation fails is by embellishing the story line making it more dramatic. In the movie we see Franz passing Tomas on the street, who is on his way to see Sabina. The introduction of this chance meeting/passing, which im sure didn't happen in the book, gives Tomas' story more significance than it does make it light.
There are many other examples where the continuity of the story has been changed, imo for the worst, however this might have been done because the book simply doesn't convert well into a movie, such is Kundera's style. This makes we wonder if all the generous reviewers on this site were writing with their book AND movie experience in mind rather than writing about just the film. A film which is as long as it is uncompelling. For those who haven't read the book yet I recommend just reading that. For those who have, I have to say you will just be wasting your time and probably end up here writing similar stay-clear warnings.
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user\nThis film is quite boring. There are snippets of naked flesh tossed around in a lame attempt to keep the viewer awake but they don't succeed.
The best thing about the movie is Lena Olin--she does a masterful job handling her character, but Day-Lewis garbles most of his lines.
Kaufman clearly had no idea how to film this. The incongruities in bouncing between domestic household/marriage issues and political crises are badly matched. Character attitudes change without explanation throughout. Badly disjointed.
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user\nSeriously, Why do American and Frech actors pretending to be Czechs need to speak perfect English with a fake Russian accent? I am a man, so i enjoyed the gratuitous nudity--but a soft porn flick would have more of that, and at least wouldn't pretend it's artistic.
All the political statements where painfully didactic- has the director heard of subtlety? The acting was also woody and melodramatic, and the comic relief was never funny. The characters were very shallow, and I just couldn't identify with them at all.
The bit where I did laugh was when they cut the actors into archival footage of the demonstrations in Prague - and they were black and white and then sepia to match the footage-just ludicrous.
I read many of Kundera's short stories (not The Unbearable Lightness of Being), and there are good things about his style of writing (although his themes are one big male fantasy)-and I have to say, the film did NOT convey any of the goodness of Kunderas style.
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user\nHarsh, yes, but I call 'em like I see 'em.
I saw this in the late 80's, and it was truly one of the most awful, boring films I've ever forced myself to watch.
Yes, the cinematography is lovely. The Czech settings are truly stunning. The political backdrop is enticing, but unlike similar \"historically set\" stories (e.g. _Dr. Zhivago_ (qv)), this one failed to make the politics relevant to the story, or even interesting.
Sure, Olin and Binoche are beautiful. But this film manages to make even \"erotic\" scenes plodding and slow. I'm all for romance, but this movie was so boring, I started hoping the Russians would shoot them all and put an end to my misery.
I'm sure if I'd read the book, the story would have made a bit more sense. However, life's too short to expend any more time on this one.
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user\nyeah cheap shot i know, but this movie is a great example of how a collection of signifiers of 'deepness' (political turmoil, love/lust) can be combined haphazardly to great critical acclaim (see also 'american beauty'). kaufman's movie plods along with gratuitous sex scenes interspersed with often painful dialog sequences (in one scene i counted three different 'generic European' accents affected by the actors) and displays of state might run amok, yet fails to tie them together into the coherent meditation kundera offered. and in its over-long three hours it manages almost completely to gloss over franz,the missing fourth piece in the love triangle that lies at the heart of the plot, and in this manner sacrifices the novel's central mechanism of displaying the spectrum of emotions and of power relations that obtain in love affairs. it also fails to even include token screen time for tomas' son, used in the novel to exemplify some of the political points kundera was making in the novel. combined with the overweening soundtrack, these flaws make this movie's three hours unbearably weighty in tone yet light in content.
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user\nThis is possibly one of the worst movies I have ever seen. I don't care what the critics say, it's bad. I think the problem is with Kundera's novel. It's not that it's unfilmable; it's just that like 99% of his work, it's pretentious and overdrawn. He seems to be enamored with himself,his characters come off as navel-gazing, and his novels as a whole are misogynistic. I have read many of his works (even his Socialist Realist poetry. That was truly awful) -- I just don't understand what the fuss is about. Characteristics (like the self-absorption) in his novels make for infuriating reading. In a movie, all the things that I dislike about Kundera were magnified. Maybe I just missed something, but I don't think so. On a side note, I cannot believe that this is a Criterion Collection DVD. No way is this movie THAT essential.
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user\nOh, I heard so much good about this movie. Went to see it with my best friend (she's female, I'm male). Now please allow me a divergent opinion from the mainstream. After the first couple of dozen \"take off your clothes,\" we both felt a very strange combination of silliness and boredom. We laughed (at it, not with it), we dozed (and would have been better off staying in bed), we were convinced we had spent money in vain. And we had. The plot was incoherent, and the characters were a group of people about whom it was impossible to care. A waste of money, a waste of celluloid. This movie doesn't even deserve one out of ten votes, but that's the lowest available. I'm not sure why this movie has the reputation that it does of being excellent; I don't recommend it to anyone who has even a modicum of taste or intelligence.
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user\nIt's frequently said that movies can never equal the original book. Well, in this case, not only the movie is not \"as good\" as the book, but is an insult to the book. I'd rather see Milan Kundera's novel turned on fire than into this \"something,\" which the director probably calls \"adaptation.\"
All the beautiful philosophy that asks \"is it better to carry a heavy load on your shoulders, or cope with the unbearable lightness of being?\" is put aside, and instead, all the movie deals with is Daniel Day Lewis' (I cannot say Tomas) sexual adventures with his dumb wife, his mistress, and his other mistresses. François Truffaut already said it: bad directors make bad movies. Don't waste your time and money. Read the book instead, it's really worth it.
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user\nBonfires of the Vanities is a film drenched in flop sweat. I can recall no film that has tried so hard to be so unrelentingly outrageous, provocative and important, yet failed so consistently across the board. It is like a stand up comic who's not getting laughs, but can't leave the stage. The harder the film tries, the louder each attempt at a laugh results in a resounding thud. The desperation the film displays is so glaring it almost rouses pity for all those involved.
The film achieves laugh-out-loud status only twice. Once is in the sight of Geraldo Rivera playing an obnoxious, arrogant and amoral TV tabloid journalist -- which is funny only because he apparently doesn't realize he is playing himself. The other scene that deserves to be laughed at is the film's final \"big moment,\" wherein the judge played by Morgan Freeman delivers the sanctimonious lecture about what morality is (\"it's what your mama taught ya!\"). The pomposity of the moment is insulting to the point of being absurd.
Yet, one must admit it is a noble effort. It does have a good, if poorly cast, band of actors, who try to make characters out of cardboard thin caricatures. The film looks professionally made and the little cinematic flourishes that director Brian DePalma just loves are apparent, if not particularly effective. But the film, which apparently wishes to be a commentary on modern morals and ethics, never arises above the level of cartoon. Satire requires style. Farce requires energy. Even sitcom requires timing. But the best Bonfires can muster is desperation. In the end, you don't want to laugh, you just want to turn away.
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user\nThis was a great book and the possibilities for a truly great film were definitely there. But the casting decisions completely wrecked the movie. Hanks is a great actor to be sure, but lacks the smarmy, morally ambivalent characteristics needed for the lead role. Jeff Daniels would have been my choice.
Putting Melanie Griffiths in, for eye candy reasons, is understandable, but again, she did not portray the depth or ambivalence, so need to pull this off.
This movie is a great example of how every decision, even those early on in the movie production can make or break a file.
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user\nThis is one of the most atrocious rewrites I've ever viewed. If they want to make a movie with a lousy story, they should refrain from giving it a title of a fine book. There is hardly a relation between Wolfe's book and this movie other than the title. I don't mind changes if they help a story flow on screen. At least the changes shouldn't hurt the final product. The last scene in the movie is painfully unconvincing. The actors are miscast. The director and/or screen writer obviously could not decide whether to make a lame comedy or preach an unconvincing sermon.
If you've seen this movie and disliked it, try the book. If you've seen this movie and liked it, read the book.
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user\nRegarded by many critics as one of the biggest stinkers of all time (certainly the biggest stinker of director Brian De Palma's career).
Sherman McCoy (Tom Hanks) is a smug rich boy whose life goes to pieces when he and his lover Maria Ruskin (Melanie Griffith) are involved in a hit-and-run. His story is chronicled by another smug guy, reporter Peter Fallow (Bruce Willis).
Well, as I said in my summary...
What is this movie supposed to be? It seems to combine comedy, drama, and satire, but it sure doesn't add up to much. It's undermined by unimaginably loathsome, one-dimensional characters who you'd never want to have the displeasure of meeting in real life.
I'm no big fan of the novel (I started reading it once, but couldn't finish it because it wasn't to my liking) but it's obvious to me that those who did / do enjoy the novel consider this film to be a complete travesty.
I've never seen so many talented actors strive to hard to give a below-average movie some semblance of quality and fail. What a waste.
The problems start with casting nice guy Tom Hanks in a role that is clearly supposed to be UNsympathetic. And the role of Peter Fallow in the novel was that of a Brit. Bruce Willis is badly, BADLY miscast in the role. What was the thinking there.
Alas, not even Morgan Freeman can escape the film with his dignity intact, being obliged to deliver a lame, heavy-handed lecture on 'decency' after the climax.
This movie ends up turning into an absurd farce.
I liked the assemblage of talent; for that I will give it four out of ten, but I'm sure some people will say a MUCH better movie could have been made from the source material.
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user\nMost book adaptations are bad but this film left out key parts of the storyline and changed the description and some characters. They rewired the storyline and combined scenes and changed the order. They added ridiculous things into it that never happened in the book and would never happen.
If i hadn't read the book beforehand it would have been an incredibly dull film, it didn't make you care about the characters, like them or dislike them. It turns the characters into jokes.
Awful.
Ridiculous.
Waste of two hours of my life.
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user\nAs someone who has both read the novel and seen the film, I have a different take on why the film was such a flop. First, any comparisons between novel and film are purely superficial. They are two different animals.
The novel is probably intended as a satire, but it arrives as a cross between tragedy and polemic instead. Any comedic elements such as those which later formed the stylistic basis of the film version are merely incidental to the author's uniformly cynical thrust. And lest the omnipresent white suit of the author fool you into thinking this is another Mark Twain, think again. A more apt literary precedent would be the spectre of Ambrose Bierce in a top hat and tails. Tom Wolfe is equal parts clown and hack, more celebrity than author, always looking for new grist for his self-absorbed mill.
It is therefore no wonder that the excellent production skills and direction lavished on the making of the film were doomed from the start. Unlike true satire, which translates very well into film, polemics are grounded not in universally accessible observations on some form or other of human behavior, but in a single-minded attack on specific people -- whether real or fictional straw men -- who have somehow earned the wrath of the writer. Any effort to create a successful filmed story or narrative from such a beginning must have a clean start, free of the writer's influence or interference.
Having said that, I too find fault with the casting. It is not merely that incompetents like Bruce Willis and Melanie Griffith fail to measure up, but that real talents like Tom Hanks, F. Murray Abraham, and Morgan Freeman are either totally wasted or given roles that are mere caricatures.
There is enough topical material here for a truly great film satire, but it fails to come even close.
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user\nBased on Tom Wolfe's satirical novel that was praised by all (i have not read it yet) Tom Hanks stars as a wall streeter who accidentally kills a black boy while lost in a bad part of NYC Willis stars as the reporter who starts Hanks on his downward spiral.. The characters are very thin and there seems to be no empathy for anyone in this movie and for a comedy or a satire there arent a lot of laughs either..Melanie Griffith had her breasts done during filming so a fun thing to do is to see if her boobs change size during different parts of the film..This will keep your mind off other things like the lack of script or humor.. On a scale of one to ten..3
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user\nTom Wolfe's sprawling, brilliantly observed satiric novel of life among New York snobbery gets a glossy look here but is nevertheless not well served. The film suffers not merely from the miscasting of everyman Tom Hanks as an uncaring Yuppie, Kewpie-doll Melanie Griffith as a manipulative southern belle and Bruce Willis (?!) as the darling of New York's literati. The most serious miscasting was in the director's chair. Robert Altman might have breathed life into these unlikeable characters and made them interesting, but Brian De Palma, for all of his visual sophistication, has never had an eye for the nuances of the human experience. The resulting film looks good but seems blah toward its subject of dehumanization in favor of status. Honestly, if a satire does not make the viewer angry, what is the point?
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user\nI don't know what it is about Donald Sutherland's acting style, or vocal style, but he always seems to be acting from behind a massive wad of soggy Kleenex. He's just...I don't know, THICK? Somnambulistic? On meds? Weird.
That said, I just saw the flick again for the first time since its original release, and frankly, I don't remember it ending anything LIKE that. A bad ending, too, because nothing gets tied off. What about the dead husband? The annoying child (and was the kid dubbed?)? The Scotland Yard and military pursuers? I would have liked something wrapping things up and giving some dramatic closure to it all, not just the big panoramic pull-away.
And what woman sleeps with the man she knows just killed her husband? Even if she was trying to allay Needle's suspicions to protect her kid, she could always have had a headache. That last encounter made me feel way too itchy and uncomfortable...
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user\nTo make a good movie you either need excellent actors or an excellent director. You need at least one of the two. In this Eye of the Needle we have none.
I don't even remember the name of the director. He mustn't have done much in his career. I like very much Donald Sutherland but he absolutely cannot be the main actor in a movie. He falls short. Sutherland is excellent in a movie when he appears for not more than 15 minutes. I would say for instance that Sutherland was excellent in JFK of Oliver Stone when he talked to Kevin Costner on the bench of a park for 10 minutes non-stop without even taking a breath. Wonderful. But Sutherland being the principal actor in a movie is no good.
Kate Nelligan? She is probably good for TV series. The DVD is awful. Terrible colors. Terrible light. I couldn't even appreciate the scenery of Storm Island for how lousy the photography was.
This Ken Follett story was good but it's a pity they turned it into an uninteresting movie.
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user\nThe movie lacks credence with the helicopters which didn't exist until the 1950s. But no woman would do what was done here, even a woman before the women's movement of the 60s and 70s. About the only portion of the movie that you could believe in was that Germany would want to know where the landing would be. Ignore for the moment that the British had captured all the spies but even if they had not, they wouldn't have let one roam around like this just to reassure the Germans that the landing would be at Calais. It isn't one major thing that makes the movie not work. It is the culmination of all the things wrong that makes the movie fail. Bad directing, bad scripts, no attempt at authenticity (at all) all combine to just make the movie fall flat. Generally speaking spies should fade into the woodwork. The suspense comes in with the spy wondering if the information they have is valid or not and worrying about being detected. On this one that game was over from the start. This spy was doing anything but spying. Your only chance at getting something that has some credibility and instills some suspense may be to read the book.
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user\nWhen I had first heard of \"Solar Crisis\" then got a load of the cast, I wondered why I had never heard of a movie with such a big cast before. Then I saw it.
Now I know.
For a movie that encompasses outer space, the sun, vast deserts and sprawling metropolises, this is an awfully cramped and claustrophobic feature; it feels like everyone is hunkered close together so the camera won't have to pull too far back.
And the effects, while good, are pretty underwhelming; we're talking about the imminent destruction of the planet Earth if a team of scientists and soldiers cannot deflect a deadly solar flare. But other than shouting, sweating and a red glow about everything, there's no real feel of emergency.
Don't get me started about the cast. What Heston, Palance, Matheson, Boyle, et al are doing in this movie without even bothering to act with any feel for the material is anyone's guess. Makes you wonder who else's condos aren't paid for in Hollywood....
And as far as the end goes.... Well, let's just say it's tense and intriguing but it's too little too late in an effort like this. If it had kept up that kind of pace all through the film, maybe I would have heard of \"Solar Crisis\" sooner.
Two stars. Mostly for lost opportunities and bad career moves.
I wonder how Alan Smithee keeps his job doing junk like this?
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user\nOh the hilarity! Oh the joy! Another film that is so bad it's good! Or, so I thought. In actual fact, this one misses the \"so bad its good\" phase and goes, sadly, straight to the \"could have been so bad its good, but they screwed it up and made it plain bad\".
For a start its way too long. Cut half an hour and it might have been more endurable. Then put in such ludicrous plots as \"the man who is sabotaging the mission to save the Earth, because he has all the food stockpiled and he'll be rich if the mission fails!\". Duh!. Or the \"talking bomb\" plot device last seen in Dark Star. Guess what....just like in Dark Star, the bomb has a malfunction.....hmmmm. Add in a dash of \"we can't act our way out of a kindergarten play\" and you have Solar Crisis in a nutshell.
Light relief is to be had in the form of Jack Palance (or Jack Pants, as we called him in this flick), whose sole purpose in the film is to drive a kid around the desert and telephone the kid's dad to come pick him up....eventually. Between driving and phoning, Jack dispenses pointless drivel and leers and cackles a lot, but contributes little to the story, such as it is. In short, he's the best bit of the movie.
My award for \"The Most Ironic Line Delivered Straight-Faced\" goes to Charlton Heston, who, when meeting his eldest son for the first time in ages, comments that his son looks a little \"out of shape\" whilst he himself is standing there with his gut bulging over his waistband and in dire need of a Captain Kirk Corset.
Also amusing is the bad guy's top henchman, who has a bright white hairstyle that kept making me think of Andy Warhol, for some reason.
Apart from these hilarities, there's little to recommend this movie. The ending is a sequence copied from (but mercifully shorter than) the end sequence from 2001.
Tips for enjoying this movie more, if you are foolish enough to watch it, like I did:
1. Any time the bomb speaks, imagine it's called Tarquin (Trust me, it works!)
2. Whenever Chuck Heston is on screen and about to speak, pre-empt him by reciting a line from Planet of the Apes such as \"Get your filthy paws off me!\" or similar.
3. Whenever the female lead is looking stressed (this is most of the time) keep hoping against hope that she's having an aneurism and will die soon.
4. During the interminable \"the ship's broke again\" scenes, keep hoping the tech/engineer guys will spout a Scotty-ism like \"You cannae change the laws of physics!\" or some such crap.
Other than that, do what it takes to get you through this one. I dozed off half way through and woke to realise I hadn't missed anything, nor had the plot (laughable though it is) advanced any. So don't worry about tuning out for a few, you won't miss anything.
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user\nDisowned by Richard C. Sarafian, this disaster stunk up Japanese theaters before coming to the States and going immediately to video, where it was not seen again until the Turner networks needed something other than infomercials to fill their 3am-6am time slots and found this tape at the bottom of their bin. The Smithee name is supposed to be used when the studio hacks the movie so badly that the director no longer wants his name attached to it. But I'm afraid that Sarafian can not blame the studio entirely on this one. The actors, mostly recent graduates of \"Overacting 101\", deliver one cornball line after another. The plot is convoluted. The special effects are unimpressive. The parts that aren't laughable are just plain boring. The script or the book must have been good - why else would Palance, Matheson, Boyle, or Heston agree to appear in this dud? But something went horribly wrong from the page to the screen. Summary: Avoid. Not even bad enough to be so-bad-it's-good.
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user\nIt was one of those late night \"It's there\" I saw it things. Sometimes they are great. This one was awful, but it really shouldn't have been.
The movie had a really good cast. How can you fail when you have Charlsten Heston and Jack Pallance? We're talking Oscar winner turf here. It had good special effects. It even had some really good tits! And I mean nicely shown, full breast with full nipple and at one point even some beaver. But it didn't compensate for the one missing ingredient - a story! The plot was ludicrous. I don't mean the \"solar crisis\" sun exploding stuff, but that was bad enough. It was the rest of the stuff - the oh so stupid and totally predictable evil corporation stuff. Man that just STANK! No amount of good acting or cool space ships or fight scenes could get around that one.
I have seen the same cast members be incredibly good. I have seen wonderful science fiction movies that had miniscule casts and budgets. All the difference is in the writing.
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user\nOne of the requirements of science fiction, at least before it starts to become satire, is that it be somewhat plausible. I would think that an anti-matter bomb would do considerably more damage than for what it was intended. But I'll leave that to the physicists who might have seen Solar Crisis.
It is a crisis the earth is facing because solar flares are getting totally out of hand. They're getting close to Earth, so much so that it's become unseasonably hot, as if the entire Earth were Death Valley. The answer is an anti-matter bomb which a space ship will have to take to the sun and explode it there. That will divert the flares off in say the direction of say Mercury providing it's not in direct alignment with the Earth.
Who to deliver it, but captain Tim Matheson and his crew. That is if he can keep his mind on the business at hand and not on runaway son, Corin Nemec. Taking care of the personal side of the family problems is admiral Charlton Heston, Matheson's father, and Nemec's grandfather.
There's a villain here too, Peter Boyle who is the CEO of a multi-national corporation which in this crisis is trying to control the world's food supply for the survivors. The idea he might not survive doesn't enter into his thinking. He's doing his best to sabotage Matheson's mission.
Solar Crisis seems like a bad mix of 2001, A Space Odyssey and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Boyle seems to be taking his cue from Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor in Superman, apparently he's the only one in the cast who realizes he's in a turkey and overacts accordingly.
The rest of the cast are stalwart, true blue and dull. Except possibly desert rat Jack Palance who finds Nemec and cares for him.
The key here is that the film was directed by that noted Hollywood purveyor of flop films, Allen Smithee. The film gets as much as four stars for the cast involved and it was out in time for a Thanksgiving carving.
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user\nI had high hopes for this film, since it has Charlton Heston and Jack Palance. But those hopes came crashing to earth in the first 20 minutes or so. Palance was ridiculous. Not even Heston's acting or Annabel Schofield's beauty (or brief nude scenes) could save this film. Some of the space effects were quite good, but others were cheesy. The plot was ludicrous. Even sci-fi fans should skip this one. Grade F
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user\nYet another movie with an interesting premise and some wondrous special effects falling right into the trash can.
Boring direction and performances (with the exception of the lovely Annabel Schofield who is much cuter as a brunette and probably deserves better material, and the ever earnest Charlton Heston) earn the rating of a real stinker.
It's amazing to watch Heston perform up to his usual par and display how really bad this movie is. He even plays in a sub-plot that kept me interested just to see how it tied back into the main line of the movie. The way they ended up resolving it was that they didn't. It simply falls off the end.
Really. Don't waste your time on this one.
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user\nI saw this movie a long time ago... luckily it was for free. I have to be one of the maybe twenty people who saw this movie in the theater. I don't remember a whole bunch of it, but I do remember I was incredibly bored, the plot made no sense and when I came out of the theater the only thing I could say was at least now I know what the worst movie I ever saw was. I just was incredibly bothered by one thing: if they can make the temperature as they approach the sun low enough for humans to survive, why can't they turn it down to a comfortable temperature instead of being all hot and sweaty? How stupid do they think we are?
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user\nThis su*k! Why do they have to make movies that they must know su*k from the beginning? I mean, look at Alien from 1977. If the movie you´r about to make is not better than anything made billions of years before, why make it? I had problems with the plot and who the main character was. That's not good either.
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user\nFinal Score: 1.8 (out of 10)
After seeing 'Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back' I must have been on a big Eliza Dushku kick when I rented this movie. 'Soul Survivors' is a junk \"psychological thriller\" dressed up like a trashy teen slasher flick - even to the point of having a masked killer stalk a cast of young up-and-comers like Dushku, Wes Bentley (American Beauty), Casey Affleck (Drowning Mona) and likable star Melissa Sagemiller. Luke Wilson is also in there, ridiculously miscast as a priest. The movie, the brainchild of writer/director Stephen Carpenter, seems like a mutant offspring of 'Open Your Eyes' or 'Vanilla Sky' and movies where a character (and the audience) is caught in a world of dillusion caused by an accident/death. The movie keeps churning out perplexing images and leaves us in a state of confusion the entire running time until this alternate reality is finally resolved. I don't think these movies are that entertaining- by their very nature- to begin with, but 'SS' is rock-bottom cheap trash cinema any way you slice it. The visuals, the script, the acting and the attempt at any originality all are throwaway afterthoughts to movies like this. Plus, it's PG-13 so it doesn't even deliver the gore or T&A to sustain it as a guilty pleasure (even the unrated version is tame). I had heard that the movie contained some \"hot\" shower scene between Dushku & Sagemiller. As the movie fell apart in front of me and all other entertainment seemed to be lost I found myself waiting patiently for the shower scene - at least I would get something out of this. Then it comes: the two girls get paint on their shirts, they jump in the shower fully clothed and scrub it off. That's it. People thought this was hot? 'Soul Survivors' is one of those drop-dead boring movies that is so weak and inept that it is hard to have ANY feelings at all toward it. It puts out nothing and is hardly worth writing about. In the end it leaves us empty. Carpenter's finale is a mess of flashing light and pounding sound and that's probably the most lively part. It will no doubt be making the rounds as a late night staple on USA or the Sci-Fi Channel, due to it's low cost and PG-13 rating - and that's probably best for it.
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user\nLike a relative that gives you a bad gift, Soul Survivors has its heart in the right place but trips up with a bad execution. Stephen Carpenter's writing/directing effort borrows freely from other, better films, such as Jacob's Ladder and Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes). For those who haven't seen either of these films, I won't give the premise away; suffice to say it's not nearly as well handled here than in those two superior films.
Melissa Sagemiller stars as Cassie, about to go away to college. Her current boyfriend Sean (Ben Affleck) and ex-boyfriend Matt (Wes Bentley), both friends, and Annabel (acerbic Eliza Dushku) are in a car accident after being pursued by two killers (?) in transparent masks. She survives the wreck, but while attending college has visions of the hospital ordeal and dead people reappear and disappear, leaving her in a state of total confusion: who is dead? Who's alive? What's real?
Soul Survivors has the look of a bad been-there, done-that, gore-filled, blood-splattered, body-stacking teen exploitation flick. True, it has its share of killer-stalking-the-victim scenes (plentiful, repetitive, and mind-numbing), but at least it attempts to build suspense through ideas rather than cliches, unfortunately rather unsuccessfully. It breeds confusion much more often than cohesion, as the story becomes jumbled, messy and incoherent near key points of the mystery (predictable as it is.)
Horror fans who pick up a copy will have no idea they are in for a film that is more concerned with building an uneasy facade of reality than delivering a body count. Credit goes to Carpenter for attempting to create something beyond a derivative teen horror flick; too bad he's created a derivative psychological thriller. Sagemiller also deserves kudos for showing strength in the central performance, actually developing her character and evoking some sense of emotion as the unraveling Cassie. It's great the filmmakers try something different, but the film ends up a mixed bag and failed experiment.
4 out of 10
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user\nIf the writer/director is reading this (and I imagine you are since you should now be out of work) then I must tell you - I have seen some bad movies in my time but this one gets the distinction of having the worst premise I've ever heard.
SPOILERS - Nothing happens!
A total waste of time. I laughed out loud at the end.
SIDE NOTE - (if the whole movie was her in a coma then does the scene where she sleeps with that guy mean someone raped her while she was knocked out?)
Utter rubbish.
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user\n(A possible spoiler or two)
\"Soul Survivors\" is quite possibly the worst theatrical released movie ever. Nothing makes sense at all, there's some plot about a girl who has strange visions of people who may or may not be dead. The entire movie is just a bunch of random shots of things that don't really tie together, by the end of the film.
Tha acting is non-existent, the camera work is jerky and the script is so confusing, it just makes the movie even harder to watch.
I kept waiting for something to tie the movie together but nothing came. Definitely the worst film of the year. -****1/2 stars.
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user\nI wanted to watch this movie because of Eliza Dushku, but she only has a smaller part in it, and her character isn't very likable. However, the main character, played by Melissa Sagemiller, is extremely beautiful and a perfect delight to look at throughout the movie. This is really nothing but a showcase for her looks and talent. She does a very good job.
The story itself is, on the face of it, pretty nonsensical. After a car crash, some friends are possibly dead, but keeps on living their previous lives, while all sorts of mysterious things happen. Some bad guys are after them, but we never really find out who they are (possibly they were the ones in the other car, but we certainly don't hear anything about why they are after them). The final scenes especially seem filmically ambitious, but I can't get anything coherent out of it. The opening scene, where the bad guys (who wear some strange masks) cut a blond girl's wrist and gather up some of her blood is never explained or followed up on. Unless the bad guys are supposed to be a representation of the surgeons who're trying to pull Cassie (Sagemiller) back from the dead... but no, that doesn't seem to work. The bad guys are just bad guys; they really just mess up a story that might otherwise have been interesting. In a supernatural story about death and love and sacrifice, who the hell needs bad guys?
3 out of 10.
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user\nThis is not a very good movie, but it's not a stinker either. It is very confusing and unnecessarily long so rent it at your own risk.
My GF and I have figured this movie out (we think) so here it is:
***MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW***
Firstly, this movie is actually quite simple after you remove all of the confusing unconscious-dream-state junk (95% of the movie.)
Ignoring the junk, what REALLY happened is this: A group of school friends go to a rave one night. They leave and get into a car accident where everyone but Cassie and Sean die. That's the simple cut down version. (That's right, I said Sean, bear with me)
Right after the accident, Cassie lays in the hospital stuck in between life & death right up until the very end of the movie. This is where the dream part starts.
The movie is called SOUL Survivors, right? Cassie's mind and soul carries on after the accident interacting with the other souls (Annie, Matt, Raven, the 2 weirdos and Jude) along with images conjured up by her mind (Sean, school and everything else around her). The souls continue doing what they were defined as: Annie the rave-going chick, the 2 weirdo-killers (from opening scene), Father Jude still helping people etc.
We are then taken on a very long ride, shown lots of images (many of which my GF and I still can't tie in) but it all boils down to it not being Cassie's time to die.
At the end, Cassie wakes up in the hospital after being \"dead\" for a while. Her family and Sean are there. This is reality again. She's OK.
Then the director adds a little extra spice by trying to confuse us again by showing a little dream snippet of her in the wheelchair being strangled. But this part is really just a nightmare, and she wakes up beside Sean, obviously still dealing with her traumatic experience.
Due to space restrictions, we didn't cover every little thing, but feel free to drop us an e-mail if you want to.

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