Reviews

Sherlock Holmes has been interpreted, updated or abused countless times. Some get the essence of the original character right (ranging from the extremely faithful Jeremy Brett series to the American update in the form of Elementary (2012)), some have no relation except in name (2009's Sherlock Holmes (2009) comes to mind).

Here we have a film that at least tries and might have got away with a better lead than Ben Syder. Unfortunately, he is not up to the task. Gareth David-Lloyd is a bit too young as Dr. Watson, while William Huw is quite adequate.

Now, this is a C-movie, so we can not expect much in terms of production values. A major letdown is the cinematography. The basic setup of the shots is not to blame neither the overuse of filters but at the end most scenes were simply way too dark (so I had to apply filters of my own to adjust brightness and contrast).

What makes the film bearable is its short running time and reasonably fast pacing. Storywise it deviates from Arthur Conan Doyle's original material, as do most post-copyright productions. It is not always coherent; I feel it could use a better treatment of character development, their backgrounds and the events leading to those depicted in this film.

Overall, fair enough considering the budget, but probably rather recommendable to fans of Asylum's work than to Sherlockians.

Well, let me stress out in the beginning: I don't know anything about (thus also any book by) Dr. Seuss - except that he was this hotshot writer whom every American seem to love (I remember best the bit Joey did in the first season finale on "Friends").

As for the movie I found it good enough to earn its points: Mike Myers is funny, though Americans may find him sometimes risqué for a movie aimed at kids. Overall it was a good mix between a typical children's' message film (though the message is not quite clear) and no-non-sense fun. The FX were more than adequate (well, Rhythm & Hues were mentioned in a book about animation by Julius Wiedemann, that's how I discovered the film - my girlfriend liked the fish), the design was sufficiently artificial to make it work, and finally, for a simple tale like this it was short enough (I guess much longer and I'd have had to downrate the picture).

As a compensation for the predictable story, the Cat was quite unpredictable in the course of events (as I indicated above I can not relate to the book, so I'm writing for one who has never heard/read/seen the story before), so it never suffered from the downsides of the movie. As for the kids, they were surprisingly un-annoying, as quite often children in movies make you squirm. Spencer Breslin proved again (after Disney's The Kid with Bruce Willis) that he can play a character that I would find annoying without being annoying, and Dakota Fanning (I haven't seen her before in any movie, I think) is a girl to watch out for.

So overall, here's a family movie that can please many with (in my free-spirited mind) a slight edge that you know was meant for people to clap their hands over their mouths but actually is quite tame. If you don't mind to actually see the workings of a commercial approach to a story in a movie, you can be entertained for those 82 minutes. (And if you like the technical side of movie making, as I, you can see some mildly interesting features in the motion picture. That's how he earned the little bonus. These days Hollywood often makes super-duper movies that make B-movies appear as technical masterstrokes; witness the awful effects on "Van Helsing" or the mostly unconvincing SFX on "LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring"!)

I must admit it - I'm too closely attached to the comics on which this movie is based to give a proper review on its own merits.

As an adaptation though it has virtually nothing to do with the source material. The characters are in design halfway fitting, but for their personalities they lack everything they had in the strips. Here we have just three bored kids in a museum, who are looking for trouble. I don't know exactly when it was made clear in the comics that they are not children, but even so they have behaved much differently in the comics, much more matured - though still looking for adventure, but somehow it never came across this "childish" as in the movie. Here we have these kids trying to act as grown-ups without doing much to the story than an actual child would have, while in the comics they were usually the driving forces in the stories, showing wits and maturity most of the time.

For the movie itself, I think, it's okay. Indeed more intended for young children than for us elders who know the comics too well. As such it is a nice time-travel story, including some magic (beyond the time-travel itself) ans a lot of pirates.

As a fan of the Mosaik comics I was hugely disappointed, that the filmmakers basically made an animation for young kids, disguised as a movie featuring the Abrafaxe. It can be best described featuring three kids that were fans of the Abrafaxe and had their costumes...

Science fiction made in East Europe usually has different perspectives of life as Western science fiction. This is one example.

Not about technology or the future of our society, not even about the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (that it claims to be about), but about humans, their character traits, and their quest for the final frontier.

Accordingly the visual effects by Kurt Marks and Boris Trawkin, though awarded the Grand Prix of the UNIATEC, suffer in comparison with other fx-heavy movies made about the same time, like Academy Award-winning The Poseidon Adventure or Douglas Trumbull-directed Silent Running.

Still it creates a future that could happen any time, showing technology only in outer-space, and the stations in space and on asteroids look pretty much like good old MIR, the Russian space-station.

And yet it is rewarding for those who love the human desire for knowledge...

This was the third science fiction movie of the legendary DEFA studio and the first one to be based on an original concept (by Bulgarian Angel Vagenstein), starring Dutch Cox Habbema, Ivan Andonov (a director in his native Bulgaria) and Russian actor Vsevolod Sanayev (who died January in 1996), and German actors Rolf Hoppe and Wolfgang Greese.

Thunderheart is virtually just a mystery-thriller, yet set again the spiritual and historical background of the Sioux nation, it becomes a much more involving story. Acted with wit, intelligently written, and thoughtfully directed, it is a highlight in the careers of all involved.