Reviews

The acting and cinematography in this series were outstanding, and I was drawn in by the first few episodes. From episodes 1 - 5, I couldn't stop watching. By the time episodes 6, 7 and 8 rolled around, it seemed that many of the characters actions and reactions didn't make sense, and some situations were so unlikely as to strain credibility. For instance, a corpse is found of a woman who is the exact look-alike of the main female cop, AND this dead woman had ID identifying her as having the same name as a make believe friend the cop had as a child. And as if that wasn't enough - the cop goes undercover to live with the dead womans roommates, pretending to be the woman who was killed - as if none of these room mates were going to be able to tell the difference, and as if none of the other people in the town who knew the cop were going to give things away. All these things kept getting more and more unbelievable, but I kept watching because I thought everything would be tied together at the end - especially that we'd find out what happened to the kids who disappeared in 1985 - but the end was a big dud. We were left with no idea what happened to the kids who went missing in 1985, and we discover that since the main male cop happened to be a friend of those missing kids when he was little, and had been with them with they disappeared, that for some reason that made him ineligible to be a cop, so he was getting terminated and disciplined at the end of the series - because he'd been the victim of a crime as a child. The end made no sense and ultimately left me feeling that all the time I'd spent watching this series had been wasted.

Ok, I'm a big fan of both Matthew McConaughey and Matt Damon, and this movie had some good acting and good special effects. Some of the story was even believable and interesting, but when it came to that whole book shelf in the worm hole thing - well that just ruined it for me. So let me try to get this straight - did McConaughey go into a black hole or was it a worm hole? And once inside the whatever kind of hole it was, he ended up being outside his spaceship and behind his daughters bookshelf. And then he just suddenly woke up inside a hospital?!?! So who went in the hole to rescue him? I'm sorry, but once the bookshelves came into play, I couldn't figure out what was going on and it didn't make any sense! Plus, McConaughey left Earth when his daughter was a little girl, and when he finally sees her again at the end of the movie, she is very old and near the end of her life. You'd think they'd want to spend some time catching up, but they spend about 2 minutes together and that's it.

This was a very exciting movie with beautiful scenery, but it was hard to empathize with three of the main characters. First, the Daniel Radcliffe character is approached on the street by a guy who sounds like a snake oil salesman, with stories of lost jungle tribes and panning for gold, and a hard-sell offer of his services as a guide in a trek through the jungle. It was like watching someone fall for a phone scam, and was hard to imagine anyone being so naive and gullible. Radcliffe has some initial difficulty selling his two friends, a Swiss school teacher and a photographer, on the whole jungle adventure idea, but eventually they agree to go along as well. The guide and his three novice adventurers take a plane into the remote jungle, then head off on foot. The guide has a gun and a machete. Nobody else has a weapon for protection or a machete to help hack their way through the jungle. This was an immediate red flag - who would go into the jungle without a gun or a machete!!! After days of walking with wet footwear, one of the friends, the Swiss school teacher, develops a horrific foot infection. His two friends are not only unsympathetic, but they become openly hostile and stop talking to him when he has difficulty walking and slows them down. At one point the teacher sits outside his tent crying after everyone goes to bed because he is in pain, he's scared, and his so-called friends are being downright cruel to him. It is at this point that the guide suggests turning around and going back to civilization, but the two guys without painful foot infections refuse and develop an attitude. They all build a boat out of logs, thinking it will be quicker and easier to go down the river, but the guide seems terrified of the water, and when they have to go back to shore, the guide gets angry and says he's going back on foot with or without anyone else. The group separates when the teacher with the painful foot infection goes back to town with the guide. The other two go down the river again, but smash their boat in the rapids and then they also get separated. We get to follow the travails of Daniel Radcliffe who, over the next couple of weeks, falls into quicksand, gets eaten by ants, hallucinates, starves, and gets the same painful foot infection that the teacher had. I couldn't help deriving a certain satisfaction from all this. Eventually the photographer who had been on the boat with Radcliffe gets rescued, and he in turn goes back to the jungle and rescues Radcliffe, who appears minutes away from starving to death. We find out shortly thereafter that the guide and the Swiss school teacher were never seen again. This was a true story and I found this ending quite sad, since the only one who seemed to be a nice person probably had a miserable death. Generally I have to like the characters in order to enjoy a movie, but I still enjoyed this movie and would highly recommend it.