Cyclops

Yes, I said it's dumb. The quality of the acting is bad. The Cyclops is CG'ed and looks pretty badly done. A real live actor in a cyclops costume would fair better than the efforts of the CG team. The costumes look like they came from the local fabric store sales rack. Pretty low budget flick. OK for the younger kids, but there is a lot of fake blood and killing to be had. If they play video games, this will fall right into that category. The writing is pretty elementary. The use of cheap actor's to play secondary rolls is quite obvious. Some of the camera shots, POV, are poorly done. The use of a steady cam might have helped with some of the scenes in the courtyard shots. The better part of this being made for TV, will be the commercials between the program. Not for the intelligent viewer.

Needless to say, expectations were low for this no-budget Sci Fi flick. From atrocious acting and middles-school level CGI to uneven direction and boring subplots, Cyclops is what you've come to expect from the Sci Fi channel these days.

One interesting question was, how cold was it where they filmed this movie in Bulgaria? You could see the actor's breath in many scenes, including the indoor ones. Very strange and out of place. I never knew Rome got this cold.

The CGI was just dreadful. While the modeling of the monster wasn't bad, it seemed to change sizes continually throughout the production. In some scenes, it was enormous and in others, it was human-size.

First and foremost: the Cyclops wasn't a Roman legend, it was Greek! (Check any decent production of Homer's "Odyssey".)

Eric Roberts was the best-known name in the cast, and therefore the first name mentioned in all the promo advertising. However, with what little screen-time Mr Roberts got, even he could not have saved this turkey. They wrote the Emperor Tiberius' character as if they'd never heard anything about the real man beyond his name. They had Tiberius completely under the sway of his evil counselor.

The CGI Cyclops effect was cartoonish not monstrous! (I've seen better amateur efforts!) It has to be seen to be (dis-)believed. — And it's really not worth the trouble.

All in all, I found it not only a waste of my time but a waste of the electricity it took to power my TV.

I have to admire the film-makers' ability to get paid for this.

dreck (noun: trash - worthless trashy stuff, especially low-quality merchandise.)

Because I'm watching this travesty with BOTH eyes and my head is starting to hurt.

Before I wrote this, I checked a few other reviews and I have to ask myself if the cast and/or crew are writing their own critiques. Strong acting? Solid plot? Seriously? There IS a plot, but the only strength I find is in the stench. The directing, the camera angles, the inconsistencies... The director felt it necessary to randomly show weird actor facial expressions at useless times? A Syfy movie with no nudity, no worthy violence, horribly choreographed fight scenes and mediocre-at-best CGI.

This is the second horrible movie I've watched today... Now I know what the guys in Mystery Science 3000 must have gone through.

How Eric Roberts can go from portraying Sal Maroni in The Dark Knight to this is beyond me. The production value, low budget or not, is horrific. The costumes look like they were stolen from a nearby Halloween shop and the CGI looks like an art student got drunk and submitted some stock CG to SciFi.

That, and the gross butchering of Roman culture. The Emperor of the the most powerful empire in history clearly only hires the dumbest and most inept soldier for the city guard elite. These guys make the Star Trek "Red shirts" look like Leonida's 300.

To sum up: Take Gladiator, add a crappy subplot about a Cyclops to make it more SciFi worthy, and then give the staff 1 good actor surrounded by many, many bad ones and a budget of a 5 grade video project, without mommy's help.

I shudder to think about the future of the SciFi channel after Battlestar Galactica is done. Whether you like it or not, you must admit, after viewing terrible stuff like this, it's all they have left.