3 of 10
Cinematography by Caleb Deschanel
Paul Walker
Frances O'Connor
Gerard Butler
Billy Connolly
David Thewlis
Anna Friel
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| Timeline 3 of 10 |
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| Directed by Richard Donner Cinematography by Caleb Deschanel Paul Walker Frances O'Connor Gerard Butler Billy Connolly David Thewlis Anna Friel |
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| Michael Crichton�s most recent books read like screenplays. Or at least like he means them to be turned into screenplays with a minimal effort. Problem is, screenplays and books are very different animals. Books need more info in them than screenplays to be convincing. And screenplays need to be able to be able to convey a ton of information very quickly. In this latest version, Crichton � and his adapters, Jeff Maguire and George Nolfi � succeed in falling directly in the middle. The book does not provide enough scientific information to be plausible. And the movie does a bad job of condensing that information down to a manageable size. As my screenwriting professor said, time travel movies somehow feel compelled to try and spend a large portion of time justifying their �science.� But the audience knows its impossible, and doesn�t really care about all the reasons given. They just want the movie to get on with it. Well, the film does finally get on with it, after some ridiculous and long-winded attempts to explain wormholes as though they were faxes. Unfortunately, the audience soon discovers that there was nothing to really get on with. Mostly, the film is yet another feeble attempt to show how horrible it would have been to actually live in the Middle Ages. Apparently, the best way to do this is to use absolute caricatures of villains, including the only person that was even remotely interesting in the source material. The cast was drab, with the exception of Gerard Butler, who provided the only interesting performance. Overall, its sad to see how far Donner has fallen as a director. Even the battle pieces fell flat. Other than one excellent scene that involved flaming arrows, it was thoroughly forgettable, and didn�t even sustain the sort of bland excitement a run-of-the-mill action flick might. I�d like to end this with a quick note to all current and future studio executives: Don�t ever have your film come down to a situation where its success or failure depends on the emotive ability of Paul Walker. | ||||||