Q: #1 Vampires vs. Humans

#2 Military-reject roughneck squad as first responders to dangerous, unknown Vampire incursions.

#3 Sexy female Vampire on the side of the "good guys".

#4 Plenty of gore and action.

There are four (4) major plot devices that may help you decide if you want to watch this movie. If you want all four, then the next plot device may not deter you...

#5 In outer space.

That last one almost got me too, but I'm glad I watched. In a pile of terrible direct-to-video horror that is the Sci-Fi channel Halloween marathon... this movie is a breath of fresh air. It will stand-up against any of the other Sci-Fi channel offerings, and even against the other Vampire movie Natassia starred in (who keeps giving Uwe Boll money?).
A: negative
Q: This movie is about development. People growing and people fading, people surprising and people disappointing. It has it all and more. There is hope, frustration, injustice, justice, love and hate. It is truly a classic drama that has fantastic performances from the whole cast but especially Whoopi Goldberg in her debut role.

This movie made me feel very human and proud of it, and I suggest that this movie should be mandatory each Saturday in all prisons in the world - it touches your compassion. Rating: 10 of 10.

PS: I admit it: I shed a tear of joy during the final scene.
A: positive
Q: Every movie from the thirties is dated, but if you were to watch only John Ford movies it would seem more dated than if you watched others. i.e. Grand Hotel is comparatively modern melodrama. With Ford, there's always the hard-sell of someone's nobility (Abe, The Joads). Always the over-emphasis of some heavy's badness. Always the poorly crafted, awkward and obvious scripts. This is no exception. It's just a rather belabored device to deliver sentiment. And sentiment is all this has going for it.

What Ford does here doesn't make me appreciative of Lincoln, it just makes me wonder how the States were ever settled by the population of complete morons depicted here. Ford went on to make decent movies. This is too dated to be anything but bad. It feels entirely false.

Henry Fonda with a fake nose is bizarre. And no one from Illinois would pronounce the trailing 'S,' or say "Shonuff!"
A: negative
Q: Tony Scott destroys anything that may have been interesting in Richard Kelly's cliched, patchy, overwrought screenplay. Domino Harvey (Kiera Knightley) was a model who dropped out and became a bounty hunter. This is her story... "sort of".

The problem with this rubbish is that there isn't much of a story at all and Scott's extreme graphic stylization of every shot acts as a distancing mechanism that makes us indifferent to everything in Harvey's chaotic life.

You just don't care about Harvey. Knightley plays her as an obnoxious, cynical brat who has done nothing to warrant our respect. She punches people she doesn't like and sheds her clothes and inhibitions when the situation calls for it, but she isn't the least bit real and Knightly isn't the least bit convincing, either.

The film is boring. It's loud, too, and shackled with one of the most annoying source music scores I've heard in a long time. The final twenty minutes are a poor re-run of Scott's "True Romance" climax with Domino's gang going to meet two sets of feuding bad guys who are -- surprise! surprise! -- destined to shoot it out with each other at the top of a Las Vegas casino.

Unfortunately, this potentially exciting conflagration is totally botched by Scott and becomes a confusing, pretentious, pointless exercise in celluloid masturbation. This is not an artistically brave or experimental piece; it is a failure on every level because it gives us no entry point to the lives and dilemmas of its characters.

Mickey Roarke looks good as a grizzled bounty hunter, but he disappears into the background as the "narrative" progresses. Chris Walken turns in another embarrassing cameo and Dabney Coleman, always solid, is underutilized.

Don't be fooled by this film's multi-layered, gimmick-ridden surface. It is still a turd no matter how hard you polish it.
A: negative