User Reviews

Well made, some excellent set pieces but maybe too slow paced for some. The thing that really spoiled it though is Alex, the main character. He's a hateful, spiteful, self centered person and I spent most of the film hoping he'd be shot next. For example he refuses to allow a mother to rescue her child because he's in love with her, disconnects a radio when he finds out her husband is alive and then doesn't tell her he's alive, doesn't tell his father about his mother's funeral. He's a thoroughly unpleasant character so you feel no sympathy towards him. That's one of the main issues, we're supposed to empathise with the main star, even to a degree, but with Alex I ended up hating him.

While I enjoy complex protagonists with the foibles and issues of real humanity, the main character of this film is simply a terrible person and through the entire film I only wished for his failure. Other characters were barely one dimensional (such as his main "love interest" who gave no more than a minor protest about not being able to get her daughter in the face of massive disaster).

The story itself was somewhat nonsensical. Rain was the primary danger, yet not only did it affect people who seemingly shouldn't be affected, everyone seemed remarkably careless about it even when knowledgable.

The father setting up a Home Alone type situation is the power plant was absurd, not to mention that taking out the power plant from the inside was certainly unnecessary when just a couple of easily accessible transmission lines could be destroyed to the same effect.

Wanted to enjoy this film and it has its moments - but, despite the excuse of having an angry father, Alex is the most repressed, odious, pathetic, unempathetic, bland, and selfish human ever to be a lead character!! Even when he discovers many years later that his father had secretly made him a beautifully hand-crafted guitar for Christmas, which he never gave Alex, he still remains insensitive to his father's anger-management problems! Not even showing half of one redeeming feature throughout the entire film!! This lack of character-realism virtuly renders the entire film a pointless exercise!

This must be the movie with the most "Wait... what?" moments that I have ever seen. Having followed the crowd funding campaign, viewed every behind the scenes clips and probably watched the trailer about 20 times (shivering with excitement and anticipation every time), I had really high hopes for this flick. When rave reviews later were starting to pour in, of course I had to go see it when it finally premiered!

In Sweden, we're not particularly spoiled with high quality movie productions. And in many ways this is a technical masterpiece, no doubt. There were numerous very realistic crashes, explosions and the overall CGI was great. The photography was stunning, from time to time, as was the soundtrack/sound design).

However... It. Doesn't. Make. Any. Sense. Whatsoever! The movie tries so hard to mix action with a bad attempt of a love story and at the same time tries to tell a story about a troubled kid growing up. What were they on when they wrote the script?

What I don't like: 1) The characters are unlikable and completely unbelievable. 2) The dialogue is laughable and makes you shudder in discomfort. (I'm sorry, fellow movie goers, that I laughed out loud where I'm pretty sure I wasn't supposed to...) 3) The strategies of the military, both the defense and the attackers are highly questionable, at best. 4) The editing... Just wow... won't even go there...

I don't really know where to start to try to explain the plot, but it boils down to something going down in Sweden. A goofball dad, who is the caretaker of an underground electrical hub, seems to be the only one knowing that something bad is happening. He skillfully predicts the enemies' moves and start building some steampunk weapons to defend the bunker. Meanwhile, the military stands completely oblivious, and are somehow quickly decimated into 5 remaining people in a bunker (they soon start shooting at each other(!) though, leaving only three...). The main character, who happens to be the son of the goofball caretaker, tries hard to fix stuff but ends up being nothing more than a complete idiot the whole movie through, and would gain from someone giving him a couple of "Get ahold of yourself!"-cuffs to make him come to his senses. In the end, when it suddenly stops, we see the face of... Putin(!) Come on guys, really!!?

I love that the Crazy Pictures collective came through with this crowd funded flick and have become a name in the international movie world. They totally deserve it, and therefore I honor them with 2 points for being technical genies. With this movie though, they try so hard (it's almost as if they had 25 writers) with being everything, that it ends up being just a Crazy Picture.

Can't wait for the american version!

Is the main character suppose to be a psychopath ? He doesent tell the woman he supposedly loves ( more like tries to possess) the her husband is alive and looking for her. His father yelles at him while growing up and therefore years later he wont let the father know about the funeral of a former loved one. He dont want "the love of his life" (#bs) to go save her daughter. And also: He never smiles once. Creepy creeper.

Also - never in any movie have I seen so many phones beeing tossed ( or allegedly: slammed)

And why on earth would a 4-5 year old girl run up to a strange man she's never seen and call him "dad" ?? (ridiculous)

Scenes that where great: dead crows falling from the sky. Car-crash on bridge and car-crash in the country-side.

Other than that: Give me my money back.

I would have given this a 10 if it wasn't for the incredibly annoying character Alexander. Oh how I wished he'd get bumped off quickly. The premise of a foreign invader hinting at the Russians was well done. I agree with a lot of reviewers about the ongoing love story which was distracting. The Scandinavians do like the idea of viruses or mind-bending hallucinogenic compounds in the rain. The car crashes are very good but not excellent as you could tell when a car was dropped by a crane but nevertheless better than cgi. I always like films that bump off everybody so you don't get comfortable with an actor or actress sailing through without a scratch. The Hurt Locker comes to mind with Guy Pearce's characters demise. A word of advice. Watch the end through the credits.

No doubt, it was a thrilling movie, driven by good acting and nice twists. We'll never get to know who definitely was responsible for the attacks, but last pictures seem to tell us, it was the Russians. In the end we saw a whitewashed picture with muslims and russians as suspects. That's to cheap for a movie which tries to take realistic steps, cause it's not objective. We don't get to know about motives of the attackers. We lose view on last survivors of the government. Suddenly all the attacks seem to be focused onto only one point in whole Sweden. The movie get's lost in the drama between father and son and by that it loses realism. There are great elements in the movie but the ending becomes to easy.

Seriously, how hard can it be to write likeable characters? These characters were so dismal, morose, and uncommunicative that I was rooting for the bad guys. The main father/son duo were so awful I didn't care at all what happened to them. They threw tantrums like 3 year olds and were seemingly incapable of speech, although the Dad at least had some clue as to what was going on. Of course, he couldn't talk about it. Such a dull movie, despite the action scenes.

This could have been a good film, had it been even moderately comprehensible. The entire film we have no idea what's going on, we have no idea who's causing the attacks, we have no idea who the enemy is, we have no idea what the motivations are, and we have no idea about anything that's going on.

To compound those issues, the protagonist is one of the least likeable people in recent memories, he's kind of like some sort of semi autistic savant, with absolutely no people skills, no emotional development, and no redeeming qualities as a human being.

How are you supposed to wrap your mind around a character like that? This could have been a decent film, but it really needed some help with the writing and direction, and overall it just turned out to be a confusing mess, that was fairly hard to sit through.

Seeing the rating from fellow reviewers, I was expecting a decent movie. But the movie lacked goal. The script writers lost their way half way through the movie. Many of the scenes were like WTF. Like fellow friends, I too was laughing out loud where I shouldn't have. There are many scenes which are way too much of a coincidence. Some of the scenes cannot be accepted at all. They said it was the rain, then they go out and literally get soaked just putting on a face mask. And the government official? Seems the writers didn't have any more ideas for them. And come on, shooting each other for a piece of crap? They thought it would make the movie intense. But seriously it was so silly and off the course. So many scenes which didn't connect to the movie. I can go on and on about the different stupid scenes but will stop here. Yes, you can try and watch the movie but don't have high expectation else you may want to get inside the script and shoot the main actor right at the beginning.