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On top of that, I don't think the acrobatics outdid even those of any regular "A-Team" episode.
As for Alba, yes, she is gorgeous, of course, but the fact that she only displays one single facial expression the entire movie (pouty and surly), makes me also get bored of her "gal wit an attitude" schtick pretty soon.
You can count me out of this one, Mr. Cameron!
Wow, here it finally is;
the action "movie" without action.
In a real low-budget setting (don't miss the hilarious flying saucers flying by a few times) of a future Seattle we find a no-brain hardbody seeking to avenge her childhood.
There is nothing even remotely original or interesting about the plot and the actors' performance is only rivalled in stupidity by the attempts to steal from other movies, mainly "Matrix" without having the money to do it right.
Yes, we do get to see some running on walls and slow motion shoot-outs (45 secs approx.) but these scenes are about as cool as the stupid hardbody's attempts at making jokes about male incompetence now and then.
And, yes, we are also served a number of leads that lead absolutely nowhere, as if the script was thought-out by the previously unseen cast while shooting the scenes.
Believe me, it is as bad as it possibly can get.
In fact, it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously, but perhaps I can make some of you not rent it and save your money.
I'm trying to picture the pitch for Dark Angel.
"I'm thinking Matrix, I'm thinking Bladerunner, I'm thinking that chick that plays Faith in Angel, wearing shiny black leather - or some chick just like her, leave that one with us.
Only - get this!
- we'll do it without any plot, dialogue, character, decent action or budget, just some loud bangs and a hot chick in shiny black leather straddling a big throbbing bike.
Fanboys dig loud bangs and hot chicks in shiny black leather straddling big throbbing bikes, right?"
Flashy, shallow, dreary, formulaic, passionless, tedious, dull, dumb, humourless, desultory, barely competent.
Live action anime without any action, or indeed any life.
SF just the way Joe Fanboy likes it, in fact.
Lillian Hellman's play, adapted by Dashiell Hammett with help from Hellman, becomes a curious project to come out of gritty Warner Bros.
Paul Lukas, reprising his Broadway role and winning the Best Actor Oscar, plays an anti-Nazi German underground leader fighting the Fascists, dragging his American wife and three children all over Europe before finding refuge in the States (via the Mexico border).
They settle in Washington with the wife's wealthy mother and brother, though a boarder residing in the manor is immediately suspicious of the newcomers and spends an awful lot of time down at the German Embassy playing poker.
It seems to take forever for this drama to find its focus, and when we realize what the heart of the material is (the wise, honest, direct refugees teaching the clueless, head-in-the-sand Americans how the world has suddenly changed), it seems a little patronizing--the viewer is quite literally put in the relatives' place, being lectured to.
Lukas has several speeches in the third-act which undoubtedly won him the Academy Award, yet for the much of the picture he seems to do little but enter and exit, enter and exit.
As his spouse, Bette Davis enunciates like nobody else and works her wide eyes to good advantage, but the role doesn't allow her much color.
Their children (all with divergent accents!) are alternately humorous and annoying, and Geraldine Fitzgerald has a nothing role as a put-upon wife (and the disgruntled texture she brings to the part seems entirely wrong).
The intent here was to tastefully, tactfully show us just because a (WWII-era) man may be German, that doesn't make him a Nazi sympathizer.
We get that in the first few minutes;
the rest of this tasteful, tactful movie is made up of exposition, defensive confrontation and, ultimately, compassion.
It should be a heady mix, but instead it's rather dry-eyed and inert.
** from ****
The characters are cliched and predictable, with everyone being either snow-white pure or wholly evil.
The acting is too stilted for it to be bad in an amusing, over-the-top way.
It's doubly disappointing if you're a Bette Davis fan, because her character is not a typically fun Bette-Davis-type character;
she just gets to frown pensively a lot.
On the whole, neither my wife nor I found the movie to be interesting, moving or enjoyable at all.
It as absolutely incredible to me that anyone could make the comment that this film is not preachy.
It is not only oppressively preachy, but absurd, stagebound, dramatically straight-jacketed, and painfully overwrought.
Watching it, one feels like an 8 year old child being punished by having to write "I will not become a fascist" on the blackboard 100 times.
Now I understand that it was made during the height of WW2, and was intended to be a brave condemnation of Hitler and the terrible suffering he brought about, (which anyone would whole-heartedly applaud) and I'm sure it accurately captured the mood of the day.
But it is presented in such an immature, over-obvious, sledgehammer way, it fails abysmally as a work of art.
The only good performances here are from Paul Lukas, who brings sincerity and intensity to his role as a quietly heroic anti-fascist;
and Lucile Watson as the amusingly ill-mannered rich grandmother who slowly comes to realize how dangerous the world has become.
Though their rootless upbringing has subjected them to all kinds of hardships, the children are ridiculously shown as robotically well-behaved little snips.
They do not even remotely resemble real human beings.
And Bette Davis, a great actress, here is so one dimensionally noble I cringed every time she was on screen.
Her every word, her every gesture is meant to convey how SUPPORTIVE and UNDERSTANDING she is of the SACRIFICES her husband has to make and the great CAUSE he is fighting for, that she must've been wired to receive a painful electric shock if she dared allowed any hint of doubt or shading to surface in her portrayal.
So yes, this is a very IMPORTANT film, just not a very good one.
There seems to be little in the way of middle ground where Watch On the Rhine is concerned.
One either likes it very much, applauding its sincerity, its liberal point of view and fine acting, or else loathes its obvious propaganda, mediocre dialogue, cardboard characters and overall tendentiousness.
I fall very much in the latter category, and found the film and play,--concerning the activities of European refugees in Washington during wartime--a crushing bore, worthwhile mostly for the acting, and even then only intermittently.
That author Lillian Hellman was on the side of the angels is irrelevant.
Her plays were written for people who shared her point of view, and she seldom explored ideas that weren't already held by the author and audience except to point out how dreadful the "other side" is.
Even when I find myself in one hundred percent agreement with what she has to say,--as in Rhine--I still can't stand the way she says it.
Her characters are unreal, and while her ear for dialogue shows a certain facility for the way people talk she possesses no real brilliance or originality.
She really had nothing new to say.
I thoroughly agree with the late Mary McCarthy's long overdue dismantling of Hellman reputation some years ago.
For those who think the theatre is dead or in extremis and yearn for the good old days, I urge a peek at Watch On the Rhine, as bad in its way as Angels In America, which only goes to show that the theatre had one foot in the grave sixty years ago.
The sign of a classic movie is that it ages like a fine red wine.
This movie is no Cabarnet and certainly no Casablanca.
I agree with the other reviewers that the children in the movie are an unfortunate mutation that now plagues us nightly in sit-coms and the dialogue is stilted and preachy.
But let's look at the obsolete theme of the movie.
With the passage of sixty plus years of history comes wisdom.
Since Watch on the Rhine, author Lillian Hellman has been exposed as a Bidenesque plagiarist with her so called real-life story "Julia" from her book "Pentimento."
As one of the most odious of a plethora of Western-based USSR apologists, it is obvious her theme in the play and movie was to stir America to action to save the bloody Soviet dictator Stalin and international communism from the fascists, who had just proved their military superiority in Spain.
As one reviewer correctly noted, this is not a pro-American play and movie, as Lillian went to her grave an American-loathing communist.
This film chronicles that familiar smug stupidity of the intellectual elites that made up the American Left then, just as now the full mooner Left of The Daily Kos and Michael Moore has bought into the conspiracy theories and once again given aid and comfort to those who would destroy America.
When I was younger I really enjoyed watching bad television.
We've all been guilty of it at some time or another, but my excuse for watching things like "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" and "Silver Spoons" is this: I was young and naive;
ignorant of what makes a show really worthwhile.
Thankfully, I now appreciate the good stuff.
Stargate SG-1 is not good.
The 12 year-old me would love every hackneyed bit of it, every line of stilted dialogue, every bit of needless technobabble.
The writing is beyond insipid;
so bland and uninspired it makes one miss Star Trek: Voyager.
If your show makes me long for the worst Trek show ever, you're in trouble.
The film Stargate is a wonderful guilty pleasure, anchored by two solid performances by James Spader and Kurt Russell, full of fascinating Egyptian architecture and culture, a wonderful musical score, and cool sci-fi ideas.
With the exception of a little of the original music, none of what made the film fun appears in this show.
Even Richard Dean Anderson, who made MacGyver watchable and Legend interesting, seems like he's half asleep most episodes.
The budget must have been very low because the sets sometimes look like somebody's basement.
The cinematography isn't much better, as vanilla and dull as the scripts.
It amazes me that shows with a lot more style (like Farscape) and substance (like the reimagined Battlestar Galactica) have smaller, less rabid fanbases than this pap.
It just doesn't deserve it.
I cannot believe how popular this show is.
I consider myself an avid sci-fi fan.
I have read countless sci-fi novels and have enjoyed many sci-fi movies and TV shows.
I really wouldn't even consider this true sci-fi.
Every episode I have sat through was like a lame, watered down version of a Star Trek episode, minus anything that might make it interesting or exciting.
It's basically a bunch of people standing around in ARMY fatigues, talking about something boring, who occasionally go through the Stargate and end up on a planet that looks just like Earth, with people who look and sound just like Humans!
It seemed extremely low budget.
The characters are all forgettable one dimensional cutouts, and the many attempts at humor fall flat.
It reminds me when you see a commercial with a famous athlete in it, trying to be funny, but he is not.
It is just sad.
The movie was terrible as well.
There is so much you can do with a portal through space, yet every place the ARMY people go is BORING!
This shows no imagination!
I actually thought the TV series "Alien Nation" from a few years back (based on the movie Alien Nation) was much better.
That show actually had good story lines and decent characters.
I wasn't crazy about "Alien Nation", but compared to this overrated crap, it was great!
Also, unlike the great new "Battlestar Galactica" series, "Stargate" copied the look and feel of the lame movie too closely!