Ghostboat

Sometimes, watching standard and not particularly famous movie, you stumble on a real gem. Ghostboat tells a story used in many films. A ship/submarine falls into a time tunnel... but in this movie things are much better done. The story captivates the viewer, although the plot is predictable, it is not boring. The directing and acting is perfect. Worth every minute of watching. I didn't know David Jason as an actor, but half the fun of the movie is his performance.

Of course the effects are not the best quality and there are many scenes which look as from cheap b-movie but this is not multydolar production.

I don't tend to watch a lot of television (preferring to stick to DVDs) so something has really got to interest me to get me to firstly remember the programme's on and secondly to actually watch.

The thing that immediately attracted me to the programme was, of course, fabulous actor David Jason. And yet again he excels himself in this wonderful thriller.

The story is based on a book also called 'Ghostboat' and is about a submarine called the Scorpion that surfaces in 1981-but which hasn't been seen since the second world war where it was presumed to have sunk. When it sank only one survivor was found, Jack Hardy (David Jason) who can't remember anything due to amnesia) When the sub resurfaces, Hardy is invited to go on a journey on the sub, with another crew and retrace the path the Scorpion took to find out what happened to it.

When they first go onto the sub to check out the damage and pull out the bodies of the dead, they find something astonishing. There are no bodies, everything is as the crew left it 40 years ago, nothing has changed.

And so the journey begins. Hardy can hear voices, things are happening in the same way they did 40 years ago-and the crew are beginning to change. As Hardy says 'The past is breaking through' The CGI effects in the film are very, very good, although not perfect, the storyline is gripping, the acting and cast are stellar.

The perfect thing for the family to gather in front of the telly to watch-10/10!

A story like this will not appeal to everyone but I thought it was very original and well put together overall. A good change from the usual period dramas that come from British productions. There were some bits that could have been better with regards to acting and script but it was still entertaining. Some story points are a bit too subtle and easy to miss so might need a second viewing to fully appreciate how it all fits together. The ending was quite bold and strong which I didn't expect. The visual effects were good for a relatively low budget production and there was quite a lot of computer graphics that looked as good as from a feature film.

Quite a lot of CGI in this piece of ITV telly, but not to the extent that it takes away from the acting or the story. In this age where people want more and more 'instant classics', this will probably not impress some people who will see it as a predictable story with an equally predictable ending. I didn't, honestly think it was a bad effort at all. David Jason can easily take-on a role such as this and make is watchable. It lends itself to the subtle chills that the stories of M.R. James deliver, and although it may not be groundbreaking it is certainly a change from the usual stock of 'Drama' that ITV dish up (i.e. detective shows, or pseudo-reality TV.) All-in-all, it was easy viewing and has a satisfying ending. Worth a look.

A derivative but nonetheless intriguing set up; a ship (in this case a submarine) is found many years after it sank, with no sign of the crew, or what happened to them. This has been done many times, it is essentially the story of the Marie Celeste. Despite that the set up hooked me, I love these kind of vaguely supernatural / time travel plot lines, however familiar they are.

To be honest I was disappointed by what was delivered. David Jason is a fine actor but his character in this came over as terse, sullen and not especially interesting. As he is the lead, and therefore your focal point throughout the story, this was a big failing. He just wasn't interesting or unusual enough, you learned almost nothing about his character despite him being on screen for most of the 180 minutes.

The plot itself seemed to peter out rather than deliver a climax, for a thriller (or at least a war time drama) I felt there was too little tension. The actual operation of the submarine and the technical side all felt very authentic but this did not compensate for the lack of plot, or genuinely interesting characters. The officers were all a little stiff, the crew were similarly generic, all of them have been seen many times before.

Towards the end I felt the plot simply ran out of ideas and some of what happened bordered on silly. The story seemed to flirt with the premise it had created, rather than really go into it. I never felt this story got going, I appreciate it was television but there was far too much chatter. It was slow in places where it needed pace, or another twist and this was, for me at least, the other major failing; ultimately the story lacked imagination. What Ghostboat delivered was almost exactly what you expected, no more. There was no moment when I thought 'now that is interesting, I never saw that coming'.

Despite these misgivings I thought it was not bad for a TV two parter. It was ambitious and though it failed to hit the target it was at the very least something different.