input: You can't really go far when the initial story isn't all that great. The premise of cyborg's needing blood is just dopey.

The script is blase'. The actors don't have much to work with. The sets were staged out in the desert to cut costs. It's a trademark that if the background is the desert, then the movie has no budget.

Lack of budget is okay, if there's a story. "Solarbabies" and "Blood of Champions" are examples of decent work from no $. but this movie looks as if they had to scrape their change together just to buy the cameraman a sandwich. Again, forgivable if only the story didn't just plain suck.

Finally, this movie commits the biggest crime of all: It doesn't finish! It simply ends as if it's a commercial break away from the rest of the movie. But the rest never comes. Just odd.

Just bad.

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input: I first didn't want to watch this film, for the trailer gave the impression of a common and too expected film...but as I recently had the pleasure to discover the surprising "Mensonges et trahisons et plus si affinite"" which was beautifully directed and written by Laurent Tirard (screenwriter of "prete-moi ta main"), I changed my mind and decided to try it, thinking that "Prete-moi ta main", would be as good as "mensonges...". And it is absolutely not. The script is not bad, but it is not as well directed as "Mensonges...", the actors not as generous (especially Charlotte, as boring as she usually is) as Edouard Baer or Clovis Cornillac, and too be honest, I still don't understand how such crap can have such a success, even with such a casting... Anyway the story could have been a pretext to create so many interesting plots, but it is not as good as Tirard's "Mensonges..." though it's also written by him. Easy, unsurprising, and lazy work. Totally overestimated!

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input: Burt Kennedy used to be a very good director, but you'd never know it by this lumbering mess. Not only does this film look cheap, it IS cheap--most of the battle scenes are lifted from the far superior "The Last Command" from 1955, and that footage, shot 32 years previously, looks more contemporary than anything in this picture. The few action scenes that were actually shot for this movie are disorganized, confused and incompetent, looking just as shoddy as the rest of the picture. This has the look and feel of a bad student film (and the budget didn't seem to be a whole lot more). It moves like molasses, the acting for the most part is either over-the-top ham or under-the-top comatose--although Raul Julia comes off better than most of the rest of the cast--and it's chock full of annoying historical inaccuracies. On top of that, it's WAY too long. If you're going to make a boring film, do it in an hour or so and get it over with--don't stretch it out over three hours, like this one does. If you want to see a good movie about the Alamo, check out John Wayne's 1960 version, or even the 1955 film from which this movie stole its action scenes. Hard to believe it took six producers to make a movie this lousy. Skip it.

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input: This stylistically sophisticated visual game presents 'a story within a story'. The protagonist is scriptwriter Bart Klever who fights persistently with his new text which is, at the same time, the screenplay of the film we're watching. In the movie Bart plays a scriptwriter writing the script of the film Bart's struggle with the text becomes a narrative theme, as does the environment of the flat where he works and takes care of his little girl. The intimate environment offers ample opportunity for games of illusion involving space, light, colours and a couple of cats. The outwardly simple world of the room is further complicated by the unstable dimensions of a text continually influenced by the filmmaker's interventions, which appears on a computer monitor and serves as a counterpoint to the similarity mutable environment. The constantly changing viewing angle complicates answers to questions which arise: What is 'truth' and what 'illusion' ? Which of the observed worlds is primary and superior to the rest? Can anything serve as a basic orientation point in the narrative space?

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positive