Reviews

I was bracing myself for something really shocking and crazy after reading quite a few reviews. Masterpiece? Really? There was not a single bit of decent acting. The dialog was crap. The filming was amateurish (which to be fair it is considered a found footage film, sort of) and the natives came across as a bunch of chaotic morons that were incapable of doing anything in any kind of organized fashion unless they were in a feeding frenzy, which I know, is counterintuitive. Anything that was done to the humans in this movie had already been done previously in other movies at one time or another, and better and more extreme in later movies. The gratuitous and unnecessary killing of live animals in the movie did bother me quite a bit. I don't watch many horror movies, so I wouldn't consider myself desensitized to the human suffering depicted in this movie, it's just so badly done that it didn't really shock me. I give it points for the time it was made and probably being SUPER shocking for 1980 and for the effort put into the social and cultural statement it tries to make.

Of course I still wouldn't show it to my 14 year old, it's very violent and gory, with multiple rapes and mutilations and clearly has plenty of other content not suitable for the younger crowd, no matter how badly done it is. Sorry, I'm just not that impressed.

*A couple huge spoilers contained below* A blatant ripoff of 1980's "The Final Countdown" starring Kirk Douglas and Martin Sheen, with about 1% of the acting and effects quality.

That said, not the worst bad movie I've ever seen. If you go into this movie with the full knowledge that this is not going to have anything approaching high production values then you won't be disappointed. It's a bad movie. But I kind of enjoyed it. There are some eye-rollers to be sure but the movie was for the most part uniformly mediocre so most of the issues with it didn't bother me. It is somewhat self aware that it is a bad movie and I'll usually give a bad movie a pass if it is a bad movie that knows it's a bad movie.

The flying sequences with the German jets were surprisingly well done. The airliner itself is a joke but the exterior scenes of the fighters was better than anything else in the movie. The British radio operator acts quite well given what he is working with. The thing that bothers me more than anything else in the entire movie is how in ten minutes they were able to remove the radar, make a parachute and get it to the correct people. Oh, and the radar fits into a backpack? It looks like someone went to the salvage yard and pulled the grill off a '65 Riviera and called it a radar. Of all things for some reason this was the worst for me.

In response to the folks saying it is historically inaccurate. Yes...but they kind of address it in the movie. One of the historians was surprised by something the British radio operator said that made it sound like this was a bit of an alternate history. Sorry, I can't recall what it was right now.

The premise gets accepted a little too easily by the crew and the technical errors are too many to count but if you just relax and enjoy your popcorn and overlook the glaring errors you might not hate it too bad. There are a couple decent actors that help ground it a little bit and then there are a bunch of mediocre actors. And a couple downright horrible actors. Meh. It is what it is. My first impulse was to give it a five star rating but that is too much. I give it four because I was never tempted to shut it off. Even though it was relatively predictable and executed poorly, I kind of enjoyed it. Just turn off your brain a relax a little.

If you are going to spend almost two hours watching a time travel movie, check out the excellent "The Final Countdown." If you've already seen it and can relax and not over think it, go ahead and give this one a shot.

I rate a movie on how much I enjoyed it. I don't over analyze the script or compare it to movies from the past or rate how historically significant it will be. On a scale of 1 to 10, how much did I enjoy it within it's own context. I gave it a seven, which I did not expect to do going into this movie.

I don't understand why people go to or rent a movie starring James Franco, Seth Rogan, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, Craig Robinson and DANNY MCBRIDE and expect high art! These people are the current kings of potty humor and over the top slapstick! Good grief people, lighten up. I am normally the person in the crowd who just doesn't get the current crop of gross-out crude just for the sake of crude trend of humor nowadays but I got a kick out of this movie.

I am not really a laugh out loud kind of person when it comes to movies, no matter how funny I think it is, but I have to say I smiled for easily half the movie and laughed out loud a couple times. By the end I realized that my cheeks were just a bit sore from smiling. Some fun cameos, better special effects than I ever would have expected, and the usual gross out stuff that you would expect from every one of these actors. Plenty of drug use, foul language, nudity and other gratuitous stuff. Pretty par for the course nowadays. Why would you expect anything else? And why would anybody think the devil would wear pants? Of course his junk would be hanging out, and why wouldn't he be hung?

This movie is so over the top and unbelievable that you just have to relax and go with it. Is it high art? No. Will it get nominated for ANYTHING? Unlikely. It's an absurd and silly movie and you folks just need to lighten up. Other than James Franco, who has done some fine work in the past, look at these actors' bodies of work and then tell me again how you expected an intelligent and redeeming movie.

Mild Spoilers I begrudgingly give this a grade of seven just because of what this movie represents to the genre. There are far, far better movies I have rated as sevens but it is what it is.

How anybody can call this the greatest horror movie ever is beyond me. Yes, it is at the roots of a genre but it is still a 'B' movie, sometimes with worse dialog than 1968's 'Night of The Living Dead.' Hell, 'Night' was better in several ways, but I'm not going to go deep with this review.

The first act is by far the worst, with bad camera work, bad writing and even worse dialog.

Once the survivors settle into the shopping mall it becomes a different movie and is actually pretty enjoyable. The dialog is better, their behavior is logical and planned out, and you get to connect with them a little bit.

Near the end when the raiders show up it gets stupid again, but by then you know it's over and you don't care. All in all you just have to relax, realize that it is a product of 70's bad movie making and let it take you away. It is cinema history and genre setting, so watch it for what it is and enjoy the ride.

(Disclaimer...I posted this, my first and only review under a different user name and have since combined accounts and am re-posting this review, unchanged.)

VERY minor spoilers maybe...

Atlas Shrugged is a massive book and a pretty big read for somebody as young as I was when I read it. I have long felt it would be nearly impossible to make into a movie. Not only because of the scope and depth of the novel, but also because chapter long speeches (thinly veiled as a speech by a character but clearly laying out Ayn Rand's philosophy) would not make for great cinema. I also never thought there would be a wide enough audience to justify the expense of the kind of production it would take to convey the story without a major hatchet job to the original material.

The book resonated for me and I think led to helping form my philosophy of life. Don't get me wrong, it has never dominated my thoughts or tempted me to join the Objectivist movement, though I have identified with Ayn Rand's core beliefs. Perhaps not to the extreme, but the foundation of her philosophy is much the way I feel and try to live my life. I suspect the movie would be much more difficult to swallow for someone who has not read the book but I rather enjoyed it.

I gave it only a six based on the actual production value and not based on my impression of how well it followed the book, which it did, though hardly inclusively. If I could give it 6.5 I would. There is little passion in the acting, though I don't feel Taylor Schilling was as stilted and dry as others here have implied. As in the book, Dagny Taggart is a very driven and businesslike lady but not a robot. The Rogues Gallery of actors portraying the politicians bent on 'leveling the playing field' are the usual typecast actors playing the same role they play in every movie I've ever seen them in. The leads do a serviceable job, but I think their roles are kind of dictated by the need to cram as much information into a 90 minute movie as possible. To the filmmakers credit they don't use an excessive amount of flashy and annoying quick-cut MTV edits that are so popular today. That makes my head spin. Guess my age is showing. There are actually lingering establishing shots and decent visuals. There isn't much time to actually feel invested in the characters though. An earlier review stated that characters in the movie have, "More depth & complexity than the book." Wow, did we read the same book!? Entire chapters of character development have necessarily been left out of a movie that would take twelve hours to cover the source material properly. As a stand-alone movie it struggles to draw the viewer in and it feels a little soulless. It does succeed, rather haltingly, in conveying the protagonist's feeling (and the author's philosophy) that each person should succeed or fail on their own merits and the government shouldn't exist to redistribute wealth and opportunity. I feel much the same way. The grand conspiracy within the halls of government and the ease with which public opinion is swayed is bit much for me to swallow but I can see the seeds of it existing in reality.

Rand's loathing of the communist agenda is clearly the core of this, but again if you haven't read the book then perhaps it is not immediately obvious. As someone who DID enjoy and identify with the novel, not to mention having read many of her works(some of which are pretty dry) I look forward to the remaining parts of this movie in the hopes that once we know the characters we will enjoy it a little more. Short of making a 12 part mini-series out of it, I think this is the best we can hope for out of an adaptation of a work this large.