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bigsumo1967
Reviews
Passengers (2016)
Rom Com with peril
I read a lot of reviews before going to see this. I was pleasantly surprised. However it is not Science Fiction but Space Opera. I was caught out by the play for laughs but it did that well. It also dealt well with the moral issues faced and the acting, directing and photography were all good, but the whole 'willing suspension of disbelief' part was difficult. The treatment of hard SF - the time taken for a message to be received when travelling at relativistic speed - and fantasy - a spinning ship does not require artificial gravity - was haphazard, and the truly unbelievable part was that the whole enterprise was funded by a for profit corporation. No company would wait 250 years for a return on investment, there would be no point, and no way to enforce the contract. A more probable explanation for the system failures would be that it was intended never to make land fall and the whole thing was a scam. With all of the passengers singletons whose entire families would be gone by the time they woke up, no one would care if they never actually did. I am not going to go into how you really would do a colony ship, suffice to say that it was a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours, although If I had been in the chair the final scene would have involved the crew waking up not to find the ship changed, but a couple wrapped in each others arms in stasis in the auto doc pod.
Clash of the Titans (2010)
great steaming piles of poo
I only give it 1 because nil is not possible. I recently watched High Plains Invaders, only because it 'starred' James Marsters, and when I say that that pile of steaming excrescence was Citizen Kane in comparison to this $158 Million Hollywood 'Blockbuster' I think you get my point. I paid £5 at Tesco for the DVD of this only 1 year from its cinematic release and that should have warned me. But I was prepared to give it a go. I think I will go and paint the back bedroom as watching paint dry will be more exiting. I saw this for sale immediately after seeing the original on Film4 and the other half said that she would be interested to see how it compared. All I can say is that it does not bare comparison. The original was inspired and well original, the copy less than a reflection in the back of a bronze mirror.
Merlin and the Book of Beasts (2009)
Ah come on, it's not that bad.
Compared to the likes of High Plains Invaders and Beyond Loch Ness, this is high art. As I write this I am sitting through this for the second time. Watching the Snooker on streaming video so the Mrs found this on Syfy HD. As aficionados of the whole Arthurian mythos and having just had a trip to Broceliande in Brittany, we were happy to watch this again. As a detour from the conventional myth it is o.k. James Callis' performance is pretty good, and whilst it does not carry the whole movie it is worth the effort of watching. Some of the acting is a little wooden but compared to say Kim Cattrall in, well everything she has ever done, Laura Harris gives an adequate turn. As for the comments on the threads and previous reviews regarding her hair, the poor props, sets etc. bear in mind that this was produced for the cost of the catering budget on Battlestar. Accept that this was made for a genre TV station on a shoestring budget and limited release, and willingly suspend your disbelief, you might actually enjoy it.