Reviews

Something happened at the end of Lost Season 1, the writers got together to try and work out where to go from here, and ever since, hollywood has been churning out these shows that were written for a single season because of the way the big companies finance shows.

This means that season 2 of these shows is usually spectacularly bad and that is exactly what we get here. The writer's push a cliffhanger at the end of season one, hoping it gets picked up for another season, at which point writers have to try and invent a new plot to explain where they left off, and like Lost, everything just gets more and more unbelievable and more and more convoluted the further it gets in.

So the writing is really bad, the FX and animals are done on the cheap, and for a show that is supposed to take place in 10,000 BC it misses a thousand possible storylines just so it can push along its banal plots.

Cheap and nonsensical. The world deserves better.

I knew nothing about this before I watched it, so had no expectations. After 3 episodes I wonder why on earth it was made in the first place?

It just seems bad, bad acting (except lead guy), bad script, terrible storyline and ludicrous characters, the spectacle wearing murderer in particular is awful to watch, and the blazé reactions of ordinary people to being in the presence of someone they know is a god of sorts is ridiculous.

CGI is okay if you don't look too close but not even of the level of GoT which is over 10 years old now.

Edit: having watched all episodes I can now say contrary to many reviews here I actually think it gets much better after episode 4.

This should of and could of been quite good, but the inclusion of Vader completely ruins it, there are a thousand other storylines that would have expanded the star wars universe, instead they fell back on Vader.

Huge disappointment.

You can tell all the kids brought up on the smash, smash smash Marvel genre TV series found this too slow and unexciting, it is slow, but this allows a much better story to emerge.

The high points are never when you expect them and do not follow the usual formulaic nonsense you so often get nowadays.

Production values really are excellent, cinematography especially so.

The story is never too predictable, and each series builds upon the others but at different tangents to the main story.

The finale of series 3 really emphasised how different the storytelling is, it doesn't need to rely on huge amounts of violent action to succeed Will miss it now it's gone.

What a shame that certain directorial and editorial decisions have been allowed to ruin what looks like very good source material, all credit to those involved. The constant backwards and forwards in time adds *nothing* to this at all, just makes accessing what is a remarkable story frustrating.

What an extraordinarily bad decision to make this a musical, it spoils completely what is an otherwise very interesting lifestory.....

edit: Revised my 4 star to 6. Must admit, first 15 minutes so bad I gave up, but after ploughing through, the film gets much better, although the musical parts stick out like a sore thumb

Wow, saw the first episode of this and hoped the series was going to be ITV's new "jewel in the crown" it's replacement for Downton Abbey on prime Sunday night slot, but boy was I wrong. The initial few scenes looked as if they might have spent some money doing HQ FX but as soon as the actors started to act, and the storyline unfurled, you could see just how poor the whole thing was. The story bears no resemblance to Beowulf at all, so why they called it Beowulf is a mystery. The CGI is pretty good though and they deserve a mention for that. Episode 2 confirmed that to me at least, that the writers have absolutely no clue what they are doing, all the set- ups are blindingly obvious and have zero emotional impact. The appearance of several "moors" for want of a better word, is so out of place in the Beowulf story, I can hardly begin to understand what the writers are trying to achieve. There is no consistency in any of the culture that makes up the backdrop for the series, it's just a vastly disparate collection of characters that have no connection at all. If ITV wanted to make a Game of Thrones challenger it should at least have tried to live within its means, this poor mans attempt at a grand historical drama falls woefully flat.

Interstellar is a truly beautiful film, everything from the cinematography to acting works really well, its just a shame that the story is complete nonsense. Really good sci-fi is usually really good because it adheres to or expands our understanding of some portion of the physical universe in which we live. Even when huge jumps are made in logic we can recognize something in them that rings true, and that happens in Interstellar as well, but it also contains some mind bogglingly stupid assumptions, which for me completely and utterly destroyed my ability to believe in it. Firstly, the blight - we are supposed to believe that 50 years from now an organism evolves on Earth which not only breathes atmospheric Nitrogen, but simultaneously destroys every crop we grow for food. This is a complete contradiction, any organism that fixes gaseous Nitrogen has to metabolize that Nitrogen into a fixed Nitrogen compound such as Ammonia or Nitrate, those things we actually use to grow our crops. How or why the blight destroys all our crops is never explained, yet it is for this reason only, that the premise of the film exists. We have to leave Earth because of this organism. Poppycock!

Secondly - the first thing our explorers do on entering the new galaxy is to visit a planet which they know will cost them years in time back on Earth, when the next alternative is only a couple of months away and the third a year away. They could have checked out both other worlds in 2 years, so why risk losing 20 years? Again complete rubbish from the writers.

Thirdly- and less important, but still stupid is all of the space stations are made out of concrete! Wow really, concrete space stations, they couldn't do better than that.

With just a little more thought I might have been pulled in, but as I said good sci-fi works because it is believable in some way, and this film just is not believable in any way.

Oh dear! I can imagine the pitch now, a fantastical adventure with a stellar cast, Indiana Jones meets Hugo.. Unfortunately from the very beginning it begins to fall apart. Everything is explained all too quickly and where there may have been a hope for mystery and a great story, we are told everything in the first few minutes, much like in The Golden Compass, thus destroying all hope of the viewer gradually unfolding the truth and being drawn into the characters and events. The dialogue really does not help and everything is far too obvious, there are no secrets in this film, our main hero confides everything he knows to a scullery girl he has never even met before, and she believes it all without question. The screenplay does not really make sense either and just adds to the lack of suspense, worse still is the complete lack of spatial continuity, you continually feel that the locations chosen do not flow, and the film jars from one place to the next. I could go on and pick fault in almost all departments, and what comes out from it is a film made by a director without a singular vision. All in all a spectacular waste of talent and money.

I was really looking forward to seeing this, being a fan of the original movies. Nearly 35 years have passed since the original Superman, so I knew it would be a different beast altogether, but this sloppily written venture was a disaster in its own right.

The story was hampered by the director/writer trying too hard to incorporate original characters like Lois Lane, who really just did not belong in this film, There was no necessity for her to be in this film at all.

Then there is the action! There just seemed to be no end to the smashing up of things, it became so tedious I almost walked out. Zack Snyder has made some brilliant films, but I did walk out of "Sucker Punch" which has now garnered my worst ever movie award, and this seemed to follow on from this. Beautiful, highly stylized but essentially an empty exercised.

Henry Cavill was pretty good though.