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I went to this movie to see Russell Crowe and the digital special effects. The digital special effects were a disappointment. The biggest being when Russell Crowe went into the Coliseum in Rome for the first time. I was not impressed by the panning around the Coliseum. A good deal of it looked artificial to me. I could plainly pick out the digital stuff. When they were building the Coliseum and there was a shot going over the under construction building it was obviously digitized. In the movie there was a shot from high up towards the ground of the Coliseum and you saw all these small people and they seemed Sim City like. Any scene that had a flock of birds was disturbingly not realistic and poorly digitally created. I am sure that they could have done a much better job. I liked Russell Crowe in this film and just mused to myself what it would have been like if Dr. Wigand could have gone into a telephone booth and come out Gladiatorman and slaughtered all the CEO's of the tobacco companies at the senate hearings. It would have been neat to see right arms flying and heads rolling. The fight scene at the beginning of the film was truncated and did not seem to be as effective as it could have been. Check out Braveheart. The fight scenes in this film are excellent but Russell Crowe does not look like what I envision a Roman to look like. I think of Kirk Douglas. Russell Crowe has the looks of a bloke in an Aussie pub. One of the best performances in the film was given by Oliver Reed. I really feel this is one of his very best. Richard Harris also does fine work as Marcus Aurelius. I did not even recognize David Hemmings of Blow-Up fame. He obviously doesn't have the Dorian Gray portrait thing going on. The Emperor is a puff and I could not help thinking of the Monty Python film The Life of Brian where the Emperor says "What do they find so amooosing?" I recommend seeing this film for the performances of Russell Crowe, Oliver Reed and Richard Harris but do not expect to be bowled over by the digital special effects.

I bought the new special edition DVD of "The Abyss". I liked the DVD that showed how this film was made. I particularly liked finding out that it was filmed in an abandoned nuclear power building. The main theme of the movie is the madness surrounding nuclear weapons. All I could think about when I found out about where the film was made was "Wouldn't it have been nice if they had abandoned the quest for the nuclear bomb and all things nuclear?" Nuclear sucks! Even though there have been societies that have lasted 2500 years without a single weapon being unearthed, it most certainly is not us. As much as I like the idea of other worldly life forms being highly actualized as the very benevolent creatures in "The Abyss", I am sure that the odds are they will be just as destructive as us. I found the special effects in this movie to be ground breaking and I appreciated them even more knowing how hard it was to do them. I liked the Director's special edition version the best. I think "The Abyss" is a seminal film and if you are a James Cameron fan then "Under Pressure: Making The Abyss" will show you a very interesting profile.

I have always been afraid of the dark and have always been fascinated by monsters. That is why I went to see this film. I just found the film poorly executed. The washed out colors was particularly annoying to me. The absolute stupidity of some of the characters was beyond belief.The alien like monsters that could fly were acceptably competent as sinister adversaries but the story was extremely plodding and there were not enough scary scenes. The cinematography was not very well done. There was grade B movie dialogue executed poorly and with an accent of some sort. The special effect that you saw when the creatures were viewing the victims was tiresome and cheesy. Before people knew what an eclipse was here on earth they thought the end of the world as they knew it had happened. In this film even though most of the characters died at the hands of the malevolent creatures I still felt it was boring in comparison with other films of this genre. I can say that I found this a very unsatisfactory film on many levels but most of all was that it was not that scary. The only really powerful force in the movie was the character played by Vin Diesel. I believe he will be a force in future movies.